Age of Conan, The Review

So! Age of Conan! I just got kicked off the server for 4 hours downtime at 7pm in Japan, on a day where I didn’t have to work the following day; and I just started getting a wicked Sake buzz going, so I figured I might as well deliver early on the promise of an incoming Conan review. Hopefully my rambling will cotain a coherent start, middle, and end, and as an added bonus, I'm not violating NDAs, since the game is already out! Hooray!

There’s a little problem in that I only have about five screenshots to work with, since I was planning on doing this in a few days; but I honestly think the five I have will be enough to illustrate exactly where this game is in the Here and Now. Please also keep in mind that I’ll be constraining these images to 550 pixels wide to fit in the layout of our glorious new website. Without further ado (and even less time taken aside for the correction of spelling and grammatical errors), I present to you, the people of the jury, Exhibit A, to be labeled “The Hot Damn Oh Shit Factor That Everyone is Wetting Their Collective Pants Over”:

Age of Conan looks good. Like, REALLY FUCKING GOOD. Usually. I have a billion dollar videocard, with a 90 dollar CPU to back it up, but the game runs pretty lovely on my system with enough eye candy turned on that I can safely call the above screenshot ‘Far Cry, The MMO’ and not be completely full of shit. The water needs to be seen to be believed, as it just looks pretty sweet when you’re bobbing around out in the bay. The above screenshot isn't very good, but floating around in the water next to town, you realize that the water has actual volume. It isn't some flat 2D plane thay applied some bump mapping to. The waves are about 7 or 8 inches tall, and are individual waves.

It's good. Then you get out of the water and are confronted by the guy whose arms fold into his chest, and his forehead juts through his helmet. Stuff like that is pretty common. The little details need to be nailed down, but the engine is good. Over time, it will just get better.

You’re not really seeing it here, but the water moves and reacts to your wading through it, and omg blah blah blah i've spent about three paragraphs on 'teh wet'. Look, the last time I was this excited over water was the first time I launched CS Source, and just shot my Glock into the river for a few rounds of play, until I bought the shotgun, and entertained myself for another good ten minutes with that instead. You remember how you felt when Half Life 2 came out; don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Don't say you didn't crouch in front of that little bottle on the ground of de_dust to see your reflection in it. If your system has a used piece of toilet paper underneath the heat sink, I dunno what to tell ya buddy. Turn everything way down, and hope for the best? The game doesn’t look BAD at lower resolutions; it just doesn’t look as good as it could.

The character creation system is hot. Hot hot hot. For facial features, you get about 25 sliders with stuff like nose curve, cheek width, eyebrow height, eye depth, mouth size, mouth width, etc. You get sliders for individually beefing up the legs, while leaving the arms skinny, etc. Boobs go from.. uhh… big to bigger… err…. Yeah. No A or B cups in Hyborea, ladies, sorry : / I'm happy to say tthat the new Ixobelle is a hawt piratey chick, and it’s good to not have bones sticking out of my kneecaps anymore. I do miss cannibalize, though... ;)

There are a few graphical kinks to work out… I can see thru my hair while stealthed or swimming, and certain NPC’s breasts tend to… uhh… look around… while I’m talking to them.

Yeah.

I’m just going to leave that out there and let the imaginations run free on that one.

Anyway, moving right along…

Combat! Woo boy, here’s a big one, and you might remember in my LotRO preview and Warhammer Rants that I take this very seriously when it comes to MMOs, as over 95% of honest to god PLAYTIME is spent killing shit. Standing around with your dick in your hand at the Inn, bitching about “Osama Barak” or “Bill Clinton’s husband” don’t count as playtime in my books. At that point, the game engine could be as advanced as mIRC and still get a glowing review from me. When I want to go kill shit, though, the combat needs to feel tight, and needs to feel crisp, or I’m left wondering why the fuck I’m wasting my time on this shit when I could be playing WoW instead. Oh wait, I just got banned from WoW, that’s right… BUT STILL. Conan sports some real time combat engine that at first feels pretty fucking stupid; but trust me, you need to make it past this point in order to enjoy the game.

The attack system is broken down into three keys for attacking Left, Right, and Center (overhead), with ‘uppercut’ moves (from the left and right) being supposedly unlocked at 40. It sounds really stupid, and it felt really stupid at first. The first mobs you come across are so painfully easy that you wonder if the combat system is going to go easy on you for the whole shebang because they pity you for buying their stupid game and buying into the hype. Then, around level 10 or 12, everything clicks, and it’s fucking awesome. I can’t really explain when it happened, but fighting one mob, I suddenly ‘got it’ and from then on out I was having much more fun in the random killing of mobs.There’s a combo system that comes into play, and using a move unlocks a menu on your screen that’s like ‘okay, you used sweep (which will attack multiple foes at once), you need to use a right hand attack (or whatever) next for it to work’. Again, curse my lack of screenshots at my disposal, and the fact that I decided to write this after the servers went down for maintenance or whatever, but look…

…this is a mockup I made in Photoshop… this is similar to what you’d see pop up in a (draggable, if desired) menu on your screen. You activated Multi-Shot (or whatever), and now you need to activate a Right-hand, then Overhead attack to ‘execute’ said move. For a while I just didn’t get it, and was like ‘fuck those other buttons, I already did the move, the follow-up doesn’t matter’. EXCEPT (!) that the actual move is executed on the last button push of the combo. Ohhh! Gotcha! Okay! It sounds stupid, and I probably would have understood it much earlier had I read the manual, but once that little light went off, I was bashing heads in left and right and having much more fun with the combat. The system is so different from WoW it honestly took a complete overhaul of how I 'do combat' until I came to be comfortable with it.

With LotRO, I pretty much just recreated my WoW UI, and went to work on the game. This game isn't "right click a mob to start swinging, and throw in a different move once in a while" though. If you aren't hitting a button, your dude is just soaking axe to the face. I still wanted to have my Belkin be WASD + 1-0, but that doesn't really apply here anymore... except that it DOES, you just need to tailor it differently. After trying to map certain buttons to Right, Left, and Overhead, I finally ended up just mapping the buttons directly to my mouse. I have one of those newfangled mice where the wheel tilts, and used that as right and left. There are two buttons below my scrollwheel for increasing of decreasing the sensitivity of the mouse, and remapped those to Overhead and Sprint. I made the mouse buttons F1-Fwhatever, and just remapped those buttons in the keybindings. When I get the left and right "uppercut" moves at 40, I reckon I'll make those Alt+mouse tilt left and right.

In conjunction with the realtime combat thing is dealing with the way mobs react to this. The mobs block in a way that has them ‘putting their shields up’ almost like enemy ships in Wing Commander. The shields are full left, full right, full top, or spread out among the three. If a mob is blocking right, and you execute a combo that utilizes ‘swing left, then overhead’, it’s gonna fucking hurt, and there’s going to be blood on your monitor when it gets pulled off. If you smash a mob’s face in so bad that his grandkids feel it, you pull off a “fatality” of sort… jamming your sword in his gut and twisting it while backhanding his face or something equally over the top.

The UI is lacking. Like, Severely. There is no Addon system in place like WoW, and from what I understand, there won’t be. This is both a blessing and curse. There will be no Damage, Boss, or Threat Meters (hooray! just play the fucking game!), but there are no Bongos or Xperl either (/cry). The UI is XML, can be reskinned, and people are already popping up with some basic rewrites. I’m using a "MirageUI" that I found on Curse, and it does the job, about 800% better than the vanilla UI. This will only get better with time.

The talent distribution and ‘dinging’ in general feel pretty subdued. There’s no huge BLING signifying a level gained, and of the 19 levels I gained, I think I only realized the ding as it was happening 2 or 3 times. The other times I just looked down at my XP bar and realized I was 16 now where 5 min ago I was 15. I actually went 4 levels at one point without spending my ‘talent points’ and got to splurge on the ‘feats’ pane for 4 points straight. Woo! Feats are basically WoW’s talents, and earn you crap like ‘activate this skill to inflict more damage with bow attacks for the next 13 seconds’ or ‘increase all bow damage by 2% and offhand weapon attacks by 3% (up to 5x for 5 points spent). It’s WoW’s talent points. Nuff said.

There are also, however, general ability points that can spent for sprinting longer (the game has a sprint button like Battlefield or Call of Duty), regenerating health out of combat faster, or running faster. There’s one skill called Climbing that I totally ignored, until I came to a ladder that was like ‘oh I bet you wish you had 30 climbing skill right now eh?’ at which point I respent the points I spent in RunFast into Climbing (for a small fee). All classes can Hide, as well, and all classes can also put points into perception to detect hidden characters. Tobold has complained about every class being able to effectively stealth in the game, but for me (as a stealth class, Ranger) it hasn’t been a huge issue. Yet.

The first 20 levels are spent on an island where you get to learn your class without too much pressure from the outside world. During the ‘day’ you run around in AoC much as you would anywhere else, but selecting to enter ‘night time’ (by talking to a certain NPC) takes you into Destiny mode, where you’re on your own. It’s solo content focusing on your classes strengths. Apparently rogues stealth around stealing shit (what I did), while healers heal some NPCs or something, and maybe a warrior charges in the front door to somewhere killing everybody. I’ve only seen one side of this, the rogue side, but it’s pretty fuckin sweet. Apparently (and again, I’ve only seen the one side) it retells the same story from different angles. So even once you’ve played though it, you know the drill, you’re just filling a different role this time around. I’m pretty sure the entire Destiny thing is optional, as I was seeing dialogs saying ‘wah wah Destiny mode is too hard, lemme skip to the next mission’. If you can make it to level 20 just during Day mode, then you can probably catch the boat off the island without ever doing night mode. The server went down right as I hit level 19, so I’ll know later.

PvP! Oooh! Oooh! Kill anyone. Anywhere. I invited some guy to group with me for a quest, and not only did the fucker refuse, he took a swing on me and thought he was bad ass. Apparently Rangers (my class) are OP as fuck, so yeah… GG. People are running around just killing anyone they can, all the time. It’s fun, but there really isn’t a huge penalty (sorry Khatib). Dying doesn’t really even involve corpse runs. You stack a debuff on yourself that starts out really weak (-2 damage dealt or something), but eventually gets to be a pain in the ass if you keep getting camped. By voluntarily doing a corpse run back to the spot where you died, you can loot your ‘gravestone’ that will remove the debuff. Walking around outside, you discover spawn points’ (graveyards) which is where you’ll repop when you die. Fuckers camp these, but yeah. I just rezzed, went stealth, then beat the shit out of whoever was trying to be cute, since my class is in dire need of a nerfing, I guess. Roll a Ranger, lol. You’ll be fine. The alternative is to choose a spawn point ‘further back’ and either just hearth back to town, or continue questing around that area.

Overall, the game is solid. It isn’t as TIGHT as WoW, but nothing is. Earlier today I was thinking how fucking awesome it would be if Blizzard just licensed out the WoW engine like Epic does with Unreal, and allowed people to make MMOs based on their toolsets. The combat engine is different enough that you aren’t playing ‘a different version of WoW’, but every time your toon jumps you kinda get kicked in the face for immersion and wonder aloud C’mon,…. Is that how someone REALLY looks when they jump? Not that WoW is photoreal motion captured or whatver, but it has a flavor, or style, and it pulls it off. Conan is all I have going at the moment, so it’ll keep me entertained, but I’m not ‘settling’ for Conan. It’s honest to god fun, and once you ‘get it’, you’ll dig it.

Forreal.

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How to Fix Arena

Okay. I always preface my discussions on PvP by saying that I’m not Gladiator Billy, and I’m not. But with all the recent confusion and crying over the proposed arena rating changes and point distribution changes, there seems to me to be a pretty easy fix: just base win and loss point rewards solely on gear.

There are exactly two things a player brings to the table in Arena: Skill and Gear. Skill takes place outside of the computer (it’s the person driving), and therefore can’t be reliably used in the equation. That leaves Gear, and it's really the only thing Blizzard can nail to the wall and point at once the last person is left standing at the end of a match.

Before we go too far, let’s take a look at the core problems of arena point distribution, and some Blue Posts regarding them.

First of all, we have the very concept of arena point distribution. Points are awarded during Tuesday maintenance for your arena rankings. This used to be based on your arena score alone, and you had people joining 2200 teams without ever having played a game in order to amass arena points for the week. This had the inherent limitation that you had to actually take place in the fights; however, even if you sucked horribly, you could be rotated into one winning team’s roster for three games of suckage in a week, and still get the team points on Tuesday.

Along came rating requirements in order to purchase arena gear. You needed 1800 team rating to buy shoulders or whatever. The same principle applied; a loser could be carried to better gear than he could achieve on his own. Then personal ratings came along. If one guy only gets rotated in for losing matches… that is, he drags the team down every match he partakes in, but the team still excels when he’s not playing, then his personal rating goes to crap while the team rating still stays high.

Win Trading came along (well, came to the forefront, it was always there), as a way for losing players to still get gear they didn’t deserve. They had buddies make scrub alt teams, queue up at 4am, and throw games over and over to get Scrubby Joe’s rating up to acceptable levels to buy gear.

Now Blizzard has “solved” the problem of win trading by implementing limits to disparities between team and personal ratings. Again, just for clarification: if I joined a 2200 ranked arena team today, I’d still have a personal rating of 1500. I didn’t help that team achieve their ranking, so I won’t be able to bask in the rewards entitled to a 2200 team (the ability to purchase S3 shoulders).

Blizzard CM Bornakk chimes in with the following:

There has been some confusion regarding the changes to Arena Team and Personal rating calculations in patch 2.4.2 for those players with 100% participation on their team so we’d like to clarify how the system works now.

The adjustment to a team’s personal rating can vary based on the average personal rating of the other team while team ratings will always adjust based directly on the team rating of the other team. If the average personal rating of the players queuing for a game is more than 150 points below the team’s rating, the team will be queued against an opponent matching or similar to the average personal rating. Adjustments to your personal rating are based on the ratings by which the opposing team was queued.

• If the opposing team was queued based on their team rating, your personal rating will be adjusted based on their team rating.
• If the opposing team was queued based on their average personal rating, your personal rating will be adjusted based on their average personal rating.

Example:

• Team A has a rating of 1550. Team B has a rating of 1750.
• Team A has an average personal rating of 1520 for the members participating in the match. Team B has an average personal rating of 1490 for the members participating in the match.
• Team A wins. Team A’s team rating is adjusted based off of a win over Team B’s team rating of 1750.
• All members of Team A have their personal ratings adjusted based off of a win over Team B’s average personal rating of 1490 but it will be a smaller gain when compared to the rating their team got.

This change promotes having teams compete against players who’s ratings statistically match up best against them. In turn this will help provide the most competitive environment possible in the Arena.

The inherent flaw here is that personal ratings are able to be reset at will, by leaving and rejoining the same team. A 3v3 team can grind up to 1700, facing similarly geared opponents along the way (lol, that never actually happens, but we’re theorycrafting!), then have two players quit the team and be re-invited instantly. The team’s personal rating readjusts to a lower level. This is “Team B” in the example illustrated above by the Blizzard Representative himself: a 1700 team with a (self inflicted) personal rating of 1500 or so.

Even if Team A, and honest to god 1550 rated team somehow pulls off a victory against the 1700 team, they only receive a fraction of the PERSONAL rating they would have received. Even if they continue to grind against opponents in this same situation, by the time their TEAM rating is high enough to purchase weapons (1850+), their PERSONAL rating is still too low to buy the items, because they’ve faced re-joiners along the way.

There’s the flipside, of course… why would the members from Team A rejoin in the first place? Because of the one team member that stayed behind. His personal rating remains unaffected, and he has the added bonus of being a 1700 rating player, now going up against 1550 rated teams. Those are easy victories with the help of his two teammates. He will not gain points as quickly for each victory, but the chances of losing are all but eliminated by playing the lower bracketed opponents. He’s essentially being carried to points.

Think about it, he needs forty more points. Do you think he really cares if he gets them as 4x10 instead of 8x5, assuming the ten matches awarding 4 points each are shoe-ins?

My solution to this is to base rating awards on gear. People would try to be sneaky about it, so in order to avoid "queueing up in LOLgreens, then switching to S8 gear", make it based on all gear in you bags and on your body at the time of the win. Obviously, it would require a trip to the bank before you run arena for the night, but professional athletes don't do the superbowl wearing sweats and tennis shoes. They get ready for it beforehand. Besides, a trip to the bank to eliminate trying to hit 1600 "for real", and getting rolled by teams in full S3? Worth it.

The game already uses iLevels for in game items. Kara gear is typically 115 to 125 iLevel, with Heroic loots being in the 110 to 115 range. Black Temple gear gets up to around 14x I think, and the Arena gears are tailored to match that. Season 3 is pretty much on par, iLevel-wise, with TK / SSC / Hyjal gear.

Add up the gear levels for everyone on the team, divide it by two for 2v2, three for 3v3, and five for 5v5, and award team rating based on how much of a clear advantage they had over the other team. Do you really think people would begin to run arenas in green “… of stamina” gear? Let them! A good Mortal Strike would tear through that gear like a knife through hot butter.

If you need an influx of points, and think you’re good enough, try beating a season three team wearing dungeon blues. Scrub teams that have one ridiculously geared healer trying to keep up a noob in greens is going to have a hard time no matter how fast they can heal. Likewise, a Tier72 warrior with a druid in greens isn’t going to win against two “decently geared” toons ripping his buddy to shreds before coming for the 2v1 on him.

As I said in one of the first paragraphs, there are exactly two things you bring to the table in PvP: Skill and Gear. The skill cannot be quantified. Win trading defeats this, and will always exist in one form or another. People will find their way around it no matter what. Gear is the only other way to judge a handicap. Yes, people could buy gold and craft the most uber duber set of gear, but that’s out of control. Everyone has that option, so at least there’s equal footing. Anyone can be dragged along to Illidan kills and get a set of Glaives, but the points they would earn for destroying scrubs in battleground honor gear would be trivial.

The only other real option would be to eliminate gear completely, and just have uniform sets distributed to arena players (which is exactly what they did on the tournament realm, surprise surprise). Until that becomes the norm, I believe this would be the “fairest” way to go about it. People could handicap themselves if they were looking for a challenge (by downgrading their gear), or a “Hi Lo” team would be matched against a “2 Medium” team for even competition.

As an added benefit, this would also tie in nicely to another topic I feel is pretty silly, the complete polarization of PvE and PvP. I think if you can put on a set of tier 6 gear, you should be able to walk up to the arena vendor and buy S4 shoulders. Your Personal iLevel Rating would be high enough to prove you are that “caliber of gear” worthy. People in full s4 should likewise be able to walk up to the badge vendor and grab a set of Tier 6 gear in case they want to go run a raid. Tying the two halves of the game together just gives more people ready incentive to try “the other half” of the game without wanting to slam their face in a car door for even entertaining that notion.

Then again, maybe I’m just crazy.

[continue...]

A Whole New World

So, in one sweeping motion, I’ve gone and completely sold out on two separate fronts. By rolling Alliance, on a PvE server, I’ve completely undone anything I ever held sacred about the game. A trifecta could easily be argued with the fact I chose the class that willingly refers to themselves as “Huntards”.

After the whole “Hey I’m Gonna Transfer” and “Oops, I Need to Apply For Mensa Guild Membership Status Again, Apparently” fiascos, I’m finding it harder to log into Dreadmaul for anything more involved that checking the mail, popping into Dire Maul looking for the rare spawn, or reposting my 8 zillion Netherweb Spider Silk stacks for retardedly undercut prices. I took a trip to America recently as well, and found my old roommates from Oakland playing on some PvE server with horribly geared alliance toons. They talked of hoping to 'one day have enough in the guild to make it into Kara', and the pity valve in my head asploded. Now I’m a Draeni Huntard with a bear and two greens. I actually rolled another tank, until I realized I actually don’t hate myself enough to suffer tanking pugs all the way to 70 again. That was a nice feeling.

Now I’m torn between bringing one of my toons over to this server with a bag full of gold, or just doing it the hard way, and leaving the Horde toons behind on Dreadmaul. PvP to PvE transfers are a one way street, though, and in the end, I figure I’d end up just regretting it later if I did.

A few things about PvE servers have already struck me as odd, the first and foremost being that you can apparently have Horde and Alliance toons on the same server. The ramifications of this are pretty deep, coming from servers where you need to pick a side and stick with it (assuming you don’t have two accounts, I guess). If you do ever happen to find some sap that accidentally tagged himself for PvP and you kill him, you can expect to get a flood of tells in about 30 seconds from the dipshit’s alt crying about how hard his life is now that he has to run all the way from the graveyard back to his body. The 45 seconds it took to log out, get on the new toon, and send me a tell is longer that it would have taken to run back, Einstein. As far as I’m concerned, this whole “jump on the alt and cry about it” thing is a perk in my book. You always had to use your imagination before to concoct nerd rage stories about the people you camped. Now they telegram it to you. Bonus.

Can you send your opposing faction toons mail on a PvE server? I honestly don’t know. Are you still forced to post crap in the neutral AH to get it over to the other side? It seems like Bottom Scanner is going to get re-enabled on my toon once I have enough gold to make it worthwhile. Anyone know any addons that make your ignore list larger? I have a feeling 100 names is going to dry up pretty quick.

Here's what I don’t understand: since Horde and Alliance are so buddy-buddy, /waving and /hugging and /dancing together, why don’t they just allow them to group and raid together? Why can’t I just bring my rogue over, and raid with the Humans and Draeni? Hell, keep the language barrier there for chat, who the hell chats during raids anyway?

The other big eye opener on PvE servers seems to be what I'll refer to as Dueling Syndrome. Its like these guys are so starved for PvP conflict, that they duel anywhere and everywhere. I was actually in a cave at level 7, fighting spiders, when some guy ran up and tried to duel me. I thought he had misclicked the invite button, so I declined the duel and waited for him to resend a party invite, figuring he was on the same quest as me. Sure enough, the duel window appears again, and in chat he says:

[1.General] Nubsauce: please

…

He was asking so politely, how could I refuse? I accepted the duel, beat him down to 5%, then just walked off as mobs aggroed to him and killed him. Awesome duel, bro. You’re welcome. Don’t mention it. Fast forward an hour or so and I’m back in the Exodar where people are spamming trade looking for tanks for a Crossroads raid.

Tanks.

Like “Taunt, Sunder Armor, Watch Your Threat” Tanks. Apparently a Crossroads raid on a PvE server just involves killing the NPC guards, because no one is going to bother flagging themselves for PvP to engage the other faction. I guess you showed them! And people wonder why transfers are a one way street? Seriously? I’m not Gladiator Joe, and honestly, I tend to focus on raid content on most of my toons. For all intents and purposes, once I zone into Black Temple, whatever the hell is happening outside the instance is pretty much irrelevant. But getting to the instance, and questing outside, all require a bit more effort. That seems to be the part of the game that makes it fun. Getting rolled by 5 toons versus your one sucks, but it’s fun if you can focus fire one of them and at least give them a corpse run, too. In the end, I wouldn’t really trade it for the tree hugging “Hands Across Azeroth” I seem to be coming across on Zul’jin. The only reason I’m here at all is to raid with old friends from the states, and that’s probably going to last a month or so before I get tired of the schedule only lining up on the weekends. That’s the reason I went to oceanic servers in the first place.

Then again, this server was the 4^th in the world to finish the whole Shattered Sun Offensive event, and they apparently PUG BT and Hyjal on the weekends. Maybe getting to 70 will be less hassle, and I can get to the part of the game I enjoy more, raiding.

I’m interested to hear from you guys… why roll (or not roll) PvE? Is it worth it to bypass the drama of leveling around Hillsbrad / Southshore? Do you regret choosing one side or the other? At this point I’m still only level 16, but the vibe of the server just feeling so different, coupled with the fact that I’m seeing places like Stormwind for the first time (and have no idea where the bank / mailbox / AH is), all make it feel like I’m playing a totally different game. Maybe that alone will make it worthwhile in the end.

Probably not.

[continue...]

Please find Resume.PDF attached

Is it me, or does it seem a little silly that getting into a guild requires writing an essay discussing your strengths and weaknesses as a raider? The game itself already hinges on being a second job as it is; doesn't forcing people to jump through hoops to play together just seem counter productive to, oh-I-don't-know, having "fun"? This is a fucking video game we're talking about. Again, maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure I've never asked for a list of references before letting someone choose to be on the "red" team with me in Mario Kart co-op mode.

As noted in my last column, I recently decided to take the plunge on free server transfers, completely forgetting the fact that I'd find myself back in "Please Let Me Raid With You Guys I'm Good I Swear Town USA". I even had a few people I had been guilded with before on the new server that I sent a few tells to, and they would be like "oh, I dunno, I'll discuss it with our GM and see if I can get you into vent to have a talk with him". Gee, should I tuck my shirt in beforehand? Hold on, tell him to wait, I better shave first.

So here I am on Dreadmaul, writing these stupid applications on random scrub guild's forum pages. I have to register, click the stupid link in my email, then go back and fill out their silly little form. Do they have HR people who scan these? On a whim, I made one yesterday just being overtly silly about how retarded the whole process was, and I got some dry response about how they take the time out of their day to read my application, and how I should at least put some time into making is look nice.

This is their honest to god response, not photoshopped. I put reasons #1 & 2 on why they should accept me in their guild as "I don't have AIDS" and "I'm not retarded". They since went back and edited my own app to read "I am a dumb cunt" or something equally clever. This was their response. I couldn't make this shit up if i tried. By all means, APPLY to this guild. Their forums are a hoot.

Making it look nice? Are you fucking kidding? Hey fuckstick, I know where the sinister strike button is. This isn't a formal request for grant funding to continued cancer research we're discussing. I want to push the 'hurt' button over and over while standing behind the dragon. I would have been happier with a "WOW IS SRS BIZNESS OK" response. This guild apparently raids in dead silence, for fear of having DKP docked if (god forbid!) they cut the cheese on vent.

So instead I'm standing around in Shattrath with my thumb up my ass spaming a "/2 Full combat rogue / prot tank / resto druid looking for a guild that doesn't require me to write a fucking poem about how awesome I am on their stupid forums. Fully exalted on three toons in Kara, I intend to never be saved there again. Just fucking ginvite me, and if I suck, gboot me later" macro.

Is it asking too much to take up a precious slot on your VIDEO GAME TEAM roster? Last time I checked, this server was new, and there are exactly ZERO guilds who have hit the maximum guild size of 500. God forbid I happen to be jerking off in Shattrath and you need a tank, rogue, OR druid for a run. And seriously, if I suck, just kick me out and be done with it, but let's not pretend this is some elite group of combat hardened guerilla mercenaries you have here. It's fucking WoW, not rocket surgery. I love how guilds go from "new guild LFM, anyone over 60 accepted, PST for ginvite" to "yeah, well... we killed Gruul last night, so it looks like we're gonna have to cut the chaff and really knuckle down on dead weight around here". Or the other one I love: "well, we might have room for your druid, because he's a healer, but we're full on rogues and tanks, sorry". Oh, don't apologize to me! Apologize to the manager at Pizza Hut tomorrow when you show up late for your delivery job because you were up all night wiping to Hydross. Good luck with that, Mr. All Powerful Internet Middle Management.

Fucking ridiculous.

Srsly. I hate this fucking game.

[continue...]