Fixing Fishing

Fishing is boring. Painfully so. It has been said time and time again, and typing "fishing in wow boring" into Google has the number one result being bots that will fish for you. My banned account had max level fishing on my Rogue, only because A) I wanted to be able to fish pools of Pure Water in Nagrand, and B) Glider did it for me. "A" was pretty disappointing, as you only got one mote of water per cast into a Pure Water pool (I expected 3 or 4, to be on par with the gas extractor item for air clouds), and "B" was pretty disappointing, because I ended up being banned for it and losing my main account that I had over 72 zillion hours logged into. Since my last post on Completionism, I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at fishing, why it sucks so bad, and what can be done to make it better (or at the very least, tolerable).

Let's get one thing out of the way here, too. I don't hate fishing in real life. While "bobber fishing" would probably bore me out of my mind (which is essentially what WoW fishing is, to a degree), I actually have come to enjoy fishing. Okay, wait.. lemme rephrase that, because that last sentence makes it look like I go fishing from time to time. What I'm trying to say is that "I get it". My dad was one of those "let's wake up at 3am and pile in the car to go fishing!" kinda guys, and I hated it. It seemed so boring to me as a child, and coupled with the inevitable tangles in fishing line that would take 15 minutes to untangle, barbed hooks becoming lodged in your fingers, the fact that you needed to skewer live worms on said hooks, or the fact that after we caught fish I had to beat them in the head with the butt end of a knife before cutting open their stomach and ripping out their intestines.... wait, where the hell was I going with this?

Ah! But later in life I came to appreciate nature, and spending time in the great outdoors. Fishing was still pretty boring, throw the line out, reel in the lure. But then my father outgrew that style of fishing and moved on to fly fishing, which (coupled with the fact I was getting older) was genuinely interesting. We could spend time 'doing fishy stuff' without actually being awake at 4 am standing in a river. Tying flies, practicing casting down at the local school's soccer field. The act of fly casting made fishing an actual activity that required finesse and skill instead of just throwing the lure as far out as you could and reeling it back in.

WoW offers none of this. Not even the boring parts. WoW has you click one button (which thankfully can be hotkeyed), then move your cursor over some tiny onscreen area and PERCH, UNMOVING, waiting for the fishing noise and animation to play, at which point you can click your mouse (which CANNOT BE HOTKEYED) and reel in your catch (or fail). The perching is one of the hardest parts for me personally, because once your cursor is over the bobber you have to remain dead still while the muscles in my right arm are half flexed, waiting to right click.

I did IT work for 6 years before coming to Japan, and we used to have some HR woman named Rahel that would tell us to take "micro breaks" during the day. At the time, I thought she was just a bitch, and everything that came out of her mouth was lies and deceit, but the micro breaks thing is actually a really good thing. Whenever you would see a progress bar come up on the screen, it was a cue to relax your shoulders and take a second to look away from the screen... focus on a far away mountain for a few seconds to give your eyes a break, and generally let the tension in your shoulders and arms go for a quick second while the file opened, the filter was being applied, or the computer did whatever it was doing. Fishing won't let me take a micro break, because there's no progress bar, or the one that's displayed only shows the "maximum time" a cast will last. The fish could bite right after the cast, halfway thru the progress bar, or at the very end. The progress bar is a lie. You could look away and wait for the sound to indicate it's time to look back, but the window for clicking and making it count is actually pretty small, so your break is turned into a look-away-oh-shit-scramble thing, which is the opposite of the desired result.

This is already getting pretty long, and I haven't even gotten to where I adress improvements. I could seriously go on all day like this, but let's just suffice it to say the current implementation of fishing in WoW Fucking Sucks. Okay? There. Phew!

Okay! So what can be done? "Pretty much anything to make it better" is vague.

1) Let's actually require that you travel somewhere to improve your fishing. As it is, you can level from 1-450 just STANDING AROUND YOUR CAPITOL CITY. I can start casting in Ogrimmar as Horde, never leave the little puddle outside the Hall of Honor or whatever it's called, and attain max level fishing, while at the same time only pulling out Level 1 crap fish. I can dig the whole "only shitty fish live in Ogrimmar" thing, but how is catching shitty fish improving my skill? I can't pick 8000 peacebloom and hit 450 herbalism, I can't make 350,000 linen bandages and max out first aid, and cooking 7 million pieces of boar meat will only make me level 75 cooking. Why is fishing special in this regard? Make people earn it, or don't fucking bother. Yes, the suffering through 5,000+ casts is certainly earning it, but you see what I'm saying here. It's dumb.

2) Let's have fishing be interesting. Okay, I see where this is going to go... I want it to require require going different places (like herbalism), but I also want it to require more clicks or mouse gestures too?! Have your cake and eat it much, Ixo? I know Blacksmithing and Mining and Herbing only require "click once and wait" (sadly), so why is fishing special? Why do I need to click once, and then CLICK AGAIN IN SOME TINY AREA ON THE SCREEN in order to succeed? Make it a click once cast-reel-in or take it to another extreme, and require you to taunt the fish with mouse flicks and yank the mouse down to hook the fish. I honestly don't think the latter will happen, but why is fishing the only tradeskill that PRETENDS to be more in depth, and then isn't?

Side tangent regarding the bobber: The Windows Start Button used to be raised off the very bottom of the screen like 2 pixels, and over from the left side like 1. It was frustrating to click. Then everyone realized that it would be so much easier to click on if you just made the entire "bottom left hand corner" clickable to activate the Start Menu. Like you could smash your mouse down and to the left, and click, and it would activate. WoW's bobber is suffering from this exact dilemma. Make one button a cast hotkey, and one button a reel-in hotkey, and the problem is solved. Then I could just fish while watching TV and clicking the second hotkey when I heard the splish-splash --OR-- make it so I need to actually watch the screen and react to the fish. Don't make it stupid on two levels... that there's no skill involved, but you still want me to click some stupidly small area of the screen? wtf?

3) Give me incentive to level it. Currently, there's not a huge reason to actually LEVEL fishing. There's a reason to have it at the max level (daily quests, good fish for fishsticks and crap), but all the crap from level 1 to 350 or so is just vendor trash. It makes for good cooking leveling, but on every toon that I didn't BOT FISHING (read: all but my Rogue), I had max level cooks simply because of the meat that beasts drop. Here's a crazy idea: make the fishing daily quest usable for ANY LEVEL OF FISHING. The purpose of the daily quest is to get people to fish, right? And we've already established that you can fish from 1-450 while standing in Ogrimmar, so why not just make the daily quest "catch 5 fish". Once the quest is active in your log, you're able to catch a "Fresh ____ Fish" quest item (be it Raw Slitherskin Mackerel, or Muddy Mudskippers), and you can level your fishing skill AS you do a quest. Amazing, I know. That took me all of 12 seconds to think up, and would make fishing worth doing at least once a day, hooray!

Until the day comes when fishing is overhauled (4.2.4, the Fishing Patch!), I will happily refuse to level fishing. Wrath took a bunch of the tedium out of the game. It feels like they actually sat down in some boardroom and were like "...catching and using a hunter pet just long enough to learn a new skill then abandoning it? ...buying stupid books for your warlock pets? ...being level 70, and still getting your face raped by those stupid swarms of level 1 bugs in south barrens due to endless spell pushback? these are all stupid mechanics, to hell with them!". I salute that. Wrath does a lot of things right.

Why they turned a blind eye to the repetitive grind of fishing in WoW remains a mystery...

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Completionism

I'm not a crazy obsessive compulsive type that needs to max out my dagger skills on my warlock to 450 (or whatever the cap is), but as I was running around in Northrend, I'd cringe each time I ran by a Cobalt Node and my mining was hovering around 272. I'm also Herbalism on this lock (mining and herbalism, I'm farmer specced), and was sitting pretty at around 254 herbing for a while. This lock was given to me with 18 enchanting and no secondary trade skill at all (the bot spec, apparently), so it was painful to start out in Silverpine grinding these skills up to the level I had reached. The prospect of going to Tanaris looking for Mithril Ore and Firebloom wasn't exactly high on my list of fun tasks to undertake in the expansion.

But go back I did, and I'm better for it. The stockpile of herbs I had accumulated in my initial push netted me over 1k gold as 3.0.2 went live, and all my ore and rocks sold the day I put them up for sale as well. While everyone is busy leveling Inscription or whatever, the demand for raw mats will always be there, and as someone without epic flying, having two gathering skills has been a boon. This lock has yet to even set foot in either Blade's Edge or Netherstorm, and initially I had planned to go back and burn thru all those quests for 10g a pop one day when I was around level 76, in preparation for the cold weather flying + epic mount I would be needing. Then I realized that those quests only gave 10g a pop because the XP was converted to gold at the level cap. If I were to go back and do them now, they would just give crap XP, and the rewards for grey quests have been nerfed to 75 silver for rewards if you're way over the intended level (according to my guildie... haven't checked it out myself, but he's the resident expert).

What I ended up doing instead is making a macro:

/castsequence Find Minerals, Find Herbs

...and bound it to a spare mouse button. Now I just ride around spamming that button, and stop for any herb or ore I come across. Up to about 3k gold at this point, and only just hit 74 this morning.

Regarding the completionism, though, my cooking is still sitting at 36, and I haven't even picked up fishing. Fishing was one of the original uses for Glider on my (banned) Rogue. The whole act of fishing in WoW offers ...nothing... interesting, but I wanted to do the dailies, as well as fish up motes of water in Nagrand. I actually thought I'd be pulling 3 or 4 motes out of a Pure Water pool, but 1 mote per cast was pretty disappointing. The engineering mote extractor was a way better investment, and I'll probably grind up engineering (again) on my new rogue for the gas clouds I've seen in the Borean Tundra.

Fishing, though? Pretty sure I can happily ride out every expansion WoW will ever offer without casting that bobber in another puddle once.

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I Are Grind

Not much to report recently, but thought I should throw something out here so you don't stay up late at night worrying about me.

"Is he dead?"

"Has he dinged?"

"Honey, call the Yamaguchis three doors down; THEY'RE Japanese, maybe THEY know what happened to Ixo!"

The sad truth of the matter is that it's nothing so dramatic, I've just been busy at work with the school play coming up, and any time spent in Wrath has been a whirlwind of DoTing and fearing. My trash-tastic warlock has arrived at the far end of the tunnel to emerge a new shiny noob. My gear is now 'normal' instead of being 'awful', and I've got a fancy new spec courtesy of a wonderful post over at mmo-champion. It's the first time I've had a class that can run into a crowd just spamming buttons, and end up alive at the end with 20 corpses at my feet sparkling with loots.

While the world's first 80 was also a warlock using this spec, I'm not as bold (or easily amused). I'm still plugging away at quests, but anytime I see a mob I need dead, I pull 12 or so instead, just because I CAN (muhahahahah!).

I have school classes this Saturday, but can maybe provide more insight next week. Currently 72.7 or so, putzing around Grizzly Hills.

P.S. The zones in Wrath? Awesome! Was I this impressed by Hellfire Peninsula? I honestly can't remember : /

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"RAF" Should Really Be Called "BAA"

Not because "OMG WOW PLAYERS ARE TOTAL SHEEPLE", but because for everyone I've run across doing it (including myself), it was more realistically "Buy Another Account" instead of "Recruit A (n honest-to-God new player) Friend". This is an easy way to grind up an alt (or two at a time), but one has to wonder where the logic in buying an entire second account just for 3x leveling speed is leaving us.

For myself personally, I only roll Horde, and 99% of the time it's an undead female with the exact same skintone, face, and haircut. I just roll "another Isobelle", and pick a new class. For my druid I had to choose a Tauren, which was seriously distressing for a good two hours before I finally just hit go and started grinding. In that case, I actually even named it something different... it was a japanese word for someone who can shapeshift, I don't even remember it now. I ended up xferring servers with it, and changed it to Issobelle because it was weirding me out.

What this all basically means is that 'I've done Brill to death'. Yes, I know you can go to the Orc starting area and begin a new level one there. I've done that too. And the Tauren zone. And the Blood Elf one, too. I even rolled some Alliance Hunter a while back to play with a friend on some PVE server, and Stormwind was interesting for a few levels, but in essence, I would much rather just pay Blizzard the 80 or so dollars a battlechest cost me to buy 4 or 5 premades. They wouldn't need to be in Season 3 epics or anything, I'm just sick of leveling from scratch.

Eventually the day will come when Blizzard gives up on the old world content, and level 55 becomes the new level 1. They've done it with Death Knights, and why wouldn't they? They want rolling a Death Knight to be something fun, not a bleak reminder that the first two continents are basically class trainers, Auction Houses, and nothing else. Until that day, there is Recruit a Friend. Assuming you are like me, and running yourself up an alt, let's look at the process...

1) Set up RAF. Basically, you log into the account you already have, and under Acct Mgmt, you send an email to yourself.

My first account used the name Ramona Quimby on a whim, so I had to make the RAF-ed account use the same name (in both the email AND acct creation, later), so that I could xfer toons off the old account onto the new one. I don't permanently want two accts, and will let the old (non-Wrath) one die eventually. Whatever. Then you just make a new acct using the code from the RAF email, and are good to go. I recommend activating your retail key on the RAF account so you can make it through the fucking queues. >:(

2) pick classes that compliment each other. I've made two sets of alts, and have started actively leveling a Warrior / Priest combo. The other combo will be Mage / Druid. Basically, pick one of what you actually want to play, and then a healer backup. If you intend to play a healer as your new main, use a mage or something for the secondary. You basically want something that can DPS (and take a bit of a beating if needed), and somehting that can stand back and either chuck you heals or pew pew over your shoulder without too much interaction. A class that can rez is golden, because doing one sided corpse runs is lame.

3) Get (and use) KeyClone. It sends keystrokes to multiple copies of WoW, be they running on the same box or on different systems on a LAN. OH BUT IXO! WOAH WOAH WOAH! 3RD PARTY APPS?! AREN'T YOU IN THIS SITUATION IN THE FIRST PLACE FOR GLIDING?! Touche, and point taken, but KeyClone has a very different distinction, and one fully recognized by Blizzard as being legitimate: it won't do anything FOR YOU. You're still pushing the number 4 key, it's just going to two different locations now. Multiboxers use this program, and Blizzard has said on many occasions they support multiboxing as long as no AUTOMATION is taking place. It's also possibel to do this using wireless keyboards synced to multiple PCs, but KeyClone just makes it that much easier.

I personally set up KeyClone to ignore every key except for Shift, Alt, Ctrl, and 1 thru =. I don't know how your keys are bound, but I use a Belkin n52, and have my action bar set to 1thru =, with modifiers for Shift, Alt, and Ctrl. Those 'actions' are what I want sent to the other window. At first I only ignored WASD, but every time I would speak in gchat it came out like:

[Ixobelle]: yeah, me too, that's what I was asking you about earlier
[Izobelle]: yeh, me too, tht' ht I king you bout erlier

it would replicate every key, except WAS & D, and so it would open chat on both terminals, and begin to chat, omitting those four letters. If I opened my bag, they'd both open. It was too much. Since I'm running two copies of WoW on the same box that has two monitors, it's easy for me to drag the mouse over five inches and open the bag 'over there' if I need to. You COULD have it replicate every key (including WASD), but if you turn with your mouse, the other box will keep walking straight, and eventually it's a huge pain in the ass to realign them back up. I *think* you can broadcast mouse clicks and crap too, in which case having like two mages would just be ridiculously tandemized attacks, but I really don't care, and didn't look into it, so there!

My Warrior (Izobelle) is on my main screen, with the Priest (Ixobelle) over to the side, and I've basically got it set up like this (currently level 23 or so).

1 - attack
2 - rend / shadow word pain (dots)
3 - charge / "/assist Izobelle" macro on the Priest
4 - Heroic Strike / Smite (i got another DPS spell for the priest, forget the name)
5 - Hamstring / nothing
6 - nothing / Wand
7 - Revenge / nothing
8 - Taunt / Fade
9 - Sunder / nothing
0 - nothing / "/cast [target=Izobelle] Renew" macro
- - nothing / "/cast [target=Izobelle] Lesser Heal" macro
= - nothing / "/cast [target=Izobelle] Power Word Shield" macro

I also have an extra button on my mouse bound to "/follow Izobelle". The mouse is actually broadcasting a keystroke (tilting the scroll wheel left = "]" set thru my mouse software, Logitech Touchpoint), and I set KeyClone to not ignore that key, so I don't even need to be in the other window to activate it. Tilting the scroll wheel sets the priest to follow Izobelle, and for my Warrior it just does nothing.

... so basically I run up to a mob, and Charge it (having my Priest automatically assist me), rend it (Priest DoTs, too), and start spamming Heroic Strike (with the Priest DPSing, too). The one change I actually made was to have the Priest require CTRL-4 to cast its DPS spell since I found it was out of mana when I needed heals. Now I tend to just charge, rend, and tell the Priest to cast wand until I need a heal. If the Priest needs a heal, I use Clique for spot healing, and just reach over to the other window and heal him while the Warrior continues autoswinging.

You notice there ar ea bunch of buttons where one does something while the other does "nothing". That's by design. I already know how to play a Warrior inside out. I'm not going to need to learn any of his moves. Some of his moves are nice, but are not totally needed for leveling. I'll just use a few choice abilities, and a few from the Priest, and if some of them overlap (rend and shadow word pain) awesome. If not, I'm going to lean towards simple vs 100% effective. It may be kind of sloppy, but I'm not trying to 40 MC alone.

4) choose quests that make use of one toon. "Kill ten rats" are the best. "Loot 12 rare drops" suck. If the drop is common enough, I don't mind doing it, but I'm finding it's hard for me personally to break the habit of just "doing Brill". Each quest gives you 3X XP, so you don't need to grab every quest. I had to force myself to abandon a bunch of quests, and just move on prematurely to the next zone. I also have to remind myself to "loot that dude's head" on both toons, but it's coming easier after a day or two of doing it. Hatch has a good guide up on the process, too, showing where you should be at certain level ranges.

So far so good. I'll keep you guys posted on progress, and what's going on with my Warlock in Northrend, as well.

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Welcome Back to WoW

I'm back in WoW. It's not a huge momentous occasion, but this weekend I actively played WoW again for the first time in a while. I'd log in from time to time to check my mail or repost some herb auctions, but haven't actually done any real playing in a long time. This weekend, however, saw the delivery of a package from play-asia.com to my doorstep with Wrath, a vanilla WoW battlechest (+TBC) and 2x 60 day game cards. I "recruit a friend"-ed myself, and got busy leveling a Warrior and Priest in tandem, and transferred the trash-o-listic Warlock that Frybread from NotAddicted gave me to an actual server to with the intent of "playing some WoWzorz" (getting my WoWz on?).

Warhammer was an interesting side excursion, but it just wasn't WoW. I don't have a problem with Warhammer in any way... compared from where I was on my opinon of it in beta, they've come a long way, made an enjoyable game, and I really like the art direction or the armor sets and some of the areas. Combat just felt clunky, and more often than not while my guild was running around taking a keep or something, it just didn't feel like any of it was very important. That isn't to say a night of WoW fills my soul spiritually, but it just feels... right. It's similar to snack foods: Mochi is a wonderful Japanese treat, and the country loves it. Hooray for them, but I'll take peanut M&Ms or a chilled Snickers candybar over fresh Mochi any day of the week. It's what I'm used to, and the comfot of the familiarity is... uhh... comforting?

Following that analogy, I had reached a point where I was eating 8 or 9 candy bars a night, every night, and it gave me a stomachache. I ended up botting in WoW (I'll have my computer eat the candy bars for me!), was banned, and lost my main three 70s. It sucked, but at the time I was relieved to not have to eat any more candybars for a while. Then I ate some Mochi, and it was different for a while. The whole candy thing is getting silly, and I actually just ran across the street and bought a Snickers bar since I was thinking so much about them while writing that last part. It's out of control.

The one other thing Wrath did for WoW was brought a lot of people from my old guild (Exhumed on Daggerspine) back into play. Many people had quit playing, or burned out, but Wrath brought them back, and I actually got an email from one of my old guildies asking what happened to me. They've transferred to Cho'Gall, but many of the old crew is trying to reform a new guild there, and it feels good to be back with the familiar voices in vent.

I have about 3 more days of gametime on Warhammer, and logged in this weekend to clear out my mailboxes in case I decide to reactivate it later, but I'm pretty sure I won't. Tom Phoenix has asked me to write up a final impressions kind of thing for WAR, but I think this post kinda sums it up. There was nothing wrong with WAR, it's just that there's more right with WoW. Whether or not I can avoid getting back into the death-grind of raiding full time (and resorting to botting for flask mats) is the big mystery, but I think having a kid is going to make that impossible. I just can't commit to sitting down for 6 hours of playtime in a row anymore, so I think that problem will solve itself. : /

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LL MM NN OO PP Queue Queue

After reading up on Hatch's adventures in Recruit-a-Friend leveling madness, I was eager to give it a go myself for grinding up some alts for Wrath. I sent the emails, made the trial account, and sat down on Saturday afternoon, rip roaring to go! Then I hit the queues, and came screeching to a halt. Call me crazy, but I thought the point of waiting in line was that you eventually reach the front? Not only did the number not go down, it actually went UP. I hovered around 1000 all day long, never making progress. Oh, it gets better... hit the "continue" link for the solution to today's big Scooby-Doo mystery.



After crying LOUDLY in trade chat around the 2.5 hour mark, someone finally felt like it might be a good idea to tell me that TRIALS GET PUSHED BACK IN THE QUEUE, AND WILL NEVER REACH THE FRONT.

OH GEE THANK YOU BLIZZARD FOR YOUR WONDERFUL "RECRUIT A NEW BLIZZARD HATER" PROGRAM. IT WORKED, AND NOW I HATE YOU THAT MUCH MORE. WHAT BETTER WAY TO SHOW OFF YOUR FANCY NEW GAME THAN BY HAVING SOMEONE INTERESTED IN TRYING IT OUT WAIT IN A LINE THAT NEVER ENDS? GEE, MAYBE THAT WILL SET THE FUTURE EXPECTED LEVEL OF ENJOYMENT FOR THEM. WE WOULDN'T WANT THEM THINKING THERE'S ANY FUN TO BE HAD IN YOUR GRAND CREATION, WOULD WE? PERHAPS I'M BITTER, BUT AT LEAST I'M NOT LIVING IN A FANTASY WORLD WHERE THIS IS IDEAL? GG BLIZZ, YOU REALLY KNOW HOW TO SHOW A NEW RECRUIT A GOOD TIME. MAYBE YOU COULD OH-I-DON'T-KNOW PUT A FREAKING NOTE ON THE LOGIN SCREEN THAT'S LIKE "HEY, IS THIS NUMBER NOT GETTING ANY SMALLER? YOU AREN'T A TRIAL ARE YOU? OH YEAH, THOSE DON'T WORK, DON'T WASTE YOUR AFTERNOON".

You'd think there could be some detection scheme in place where they're like HMMM HE'S A RECRUITED FRIEND TRIAL, AND HIS FRIEND THAT RECRUITED HIM HAS BEEN SITTING IN THUNDER BLUFF ON A LEVEL 1 DRUID WAITING FOR .... SOMETHING.... ALL AFTERNOON. MUST JUST BE A COINCIDENCE!

Sure enough, this all goes down on my 'free afternoon' while I can play the game guilt free while the wife and kid are at her mother's doing grandma-grandson bonding. I finally figured it out, and got back at the end of line (after activating a retail CD key that I HAD THE WHOLE TIME SITTING ON MY DESK) right as she came waltzing back in the door asking "if I had fun playing my little game this afternoon".

Christ, I wanted to scream. THIS is a perfect example of why I hate MMOs. This kind of crap is just expected, and God help you if you're some noob choosing today for your big foray into our little slice of Hell.

*UPDATE* I finally got in the game after waiting for about 4 hours total to get both toons in together, and I find that I can't create a toon on that server, since during queue times, character creation is locked. While the 'just play on another server' argument is sure to come up, it defeats the point of 'recruiting a friend to play with you', and nullifies the 'grant a level back to an alt of the guy recruiting you' thing.

G G (-_-;)

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Having a Kid in Japan

So yeah. I promised back when I had my son in August, that I wouldn't be posting stupid pictures of him throwing up with 'awww izznt dat da cutest wittle ting u evr saw' bullshit captions. Nothing is more boring to me than other people's children, and I only really tolerate my job (elementary school teacher in Japan) because I know they'll be going home to annoy the shit out of their own parents at the end of the day. That, and the girls are awesome. I pretty much teach the girls, and if the boys pay attention, power to them. I can't stand little boys, they're such intentional shits all the time that I end up just wanting to punch them in the throat every 12 seconds. God! Anyway... people like hearing about adventures in Japan, and I figure this is a pretty big one, so here's the lowdown on having an inbred half-whitey son in Jap-an.

One of the things about living in Japan (probably the one big thing) I don't really like is the feeling of being trapped in my current line of work. I can't just stop teaching and go get an office job, or even work the drive through at the local Mac Deez. My grasp of the Japanese language isn't as good as it could be (completely my fault, and fully within my own boundaries to improve), but it's good enough to get by, and that's what I do. I get by. As long as I continue to teach school, getting by is sufficient, and doing so actually probably helps my situation in some ways. There's a girl from Australia that majored in Japanese before coming over here, and since she speaks the language fluently, she's somehow expected to know and follow all of their fucked up high, mid, low, mid-low, high-high-mid low, mid-low high-low bullshit systems of addressing one another. Nobody just says "dude" or "sir". There are like 57 ways to address a superior and grovel before them, and lord help you if you chose rank 15b when that guy was clearly an 18f. I just trample all over it, using the 'talking to a child form' with the principal at school, write it off to a general misunderstanding of their wacky culture, and get away with it. Even if I become fluent in the language and customs during my time here, I will never LET ON that I know the drill. It's much easier to exercise the gaijin smash (omfg please read that link, it's priceless) and just be done with it.

Now that I have a kid here, it's become more apparent that I'll be here for some time, or that I should hurry the fuck up and get back to America ASAP. I think having Roy start elementary school here, then getting to about 3rd grade and being like 'yeah, fuck this, let's head back to the states' probably wouldn't be a very healthy thing for a kid to go through, so we gotta kinda figure this out now (well, soon). The final plan is for my wife to open a hair salon over here, and have me do part time lessons in an after school English Juku kinda thing, but that's such a long ways off that I'm not sure I can handle teaching the same 'where are you going? i'm going to the zoo' lessons until then. There's actually a big program underway in Japan to normalize the English curriculum for 5th and 6th graders, so it's an interesting time to be a teacher here, but the new text books they're introducing are at my 1st and 2nd grade kids' level. My district is unique in that we have full time English teachers at the elementary level, and the books are aimed at schools who have never had an English lesson. They're trying to ramp the kids up for junior high, where it's a full time subject. That being the case, teaching my fifth graders "how are you? i am happy" is a huge bore for them. The official program starts next year, so we'll see how that goes...

Children with one foreign parent are called 'halfs', and whether that's a half-empty 'you are only half Japanese' or a half-full 'wow you're half American, cool!' is up for debate. In general, halfs get taunted and tormented during their elementary and junior high school years for being anything other than 'regular Japanese', then everyone jumps on their nuts when they get older, because by then everyone is sick of regular Japanese and wants to stand next to anyone that stands out in a crowd (98.8% of Japan is Japanese). I mean, elementary school kids are shits wherever you go. I grew up in a white neighborhood, and the one black kid at my school was being called a nigger every day by all the retards before they even knew what it meant. While a half Japanese half White kid is run of the mill in America, everyone here spazzes out about it like a giraffe had sex with a gorilla and created some freak abnormality.

After 5 years living in Japan, I still get random people that just blatanly stop and stare at me when I walk down the street, or push a cart in the supermarket. I've had Japanese teachers tell me I remind them of Will Smith. I'm a white guy. I recently bought a pretty big and fancy camera, and after carrying it around for a few days I realized that now, in addition to being a 'foreigner', people think I'm also either a huge fucking tourist or that I want to sell pictures of their daughters to porn sites or something. For the most part, I'm able to just ignore gawkers, but that's because it was my choice to come here; I brought it on myself. Do I really want to subject my child to that kind of shit, though, when he had no choice in the matter? Imagine you are a child with 3 eyes on your face. Would you rather grow up where that's normal, or in some land where everyone is going to stop and stare at you every time you leave your house?

I'm blowing it out of proportion, but only slightly. To say this doesn't exist would be untrue, and like I said, I can ignore it myself because I brought it on myself. I do love living in Japan, and think it's got a lot of things going for it. Random Japanese people have a strong (crazy strong) sense of unity with one another that just doesn't exist in America. But again, Japan is 98% Japanese, so of course it makes sense that they would. They also don't try to sue each other everyday, the police aren't complete assholes, and generally the vibe is that you're free to do your own thing as long as you aren't killing people. There aren't stupid amounts of guns and drugs everywhere, children's playgrounds still have play structures made out of honest-to-god real wood and cement (not foam and pillows), and Japanese teachers are free to drag a kid out of the classroom by his ear.

It's far from perfect, though. The glass ceiling for women is ridicuclous (women in general are still at a heavy disadvantage in many situations), the education system's content is pretty lacking (learning is done my rote, history books conveniently gloss over WW2), and politicians are screwing people over (hardly unique to Japan)... The question becomes one of 'which system would I rather raise a child in?' and more often than not I'm leaning with just staying here.

The question of language pops up again, as Roy will be attending Japanese schools and surrounded by a country that speaks Japanese. As I said earlier, I have the tools at my disposal to learn Japanese, I just haven't bothered... I have a wife at home that speaks English. I intend to continue speaking English primarily to Roy, and have my wife (and the country at large) speak Japanese to him, hoping he'll get a grasp on both. I have this fear that eventually he'll get sick of speaking English to me, and just be like 'Why the fuck doesn't dad speak Japanese?' but children have a huge advantage in picking up languages. It's actually been documented that the language pathways in our brains are formed at an early age, and since we use language so regularly (even talking to ourselves in our heads), those pathways become 'deeper' with use. Common neurons are always firing down the same paths to produce certain word associations, and that's why it gets harder to pick up a language as you get older. Hopefully Roy will develop the bi-lingual pathways at an early age, and while it may be confusing at first that dad says "car" and mom says "kuruma", eventually it'll just make sense. People I've talked to about this say there's nothing to worry about, but it just seems so strange to me.


Blegh... this is a bit of a ramble, and hinging awfully close on that whole "hey this is all about my kid, isn't it interesting" that I despise so much, so I'll cut this short with the promise that if this is something you're into, I can always expound further on the subject if desired.

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Wrath Warrior Priest Pwnage

Metrogamer has the best graphic ever at the top of their blog, and brings us the tale of what I assume is the ret paly equivalent of Warhammer. I had a Ret friend in WoW that suffered through all of the 'lolret' bullshit before it became flavor of the month, and Bogz gave my rogue a run for his money every time we set foot into SSC or TK. More often than not, the 'real DPS' mages, rogues, and locks would just drag our feet through the instance, picking our noses or getting up in the middle of pulls to get beers from the fridge, then we'd see our asses being handed to us by 'lolret' and have to whip ourselves into shape to stay on the charts.

I myself am (was?) a horribad Warhammer player, just charging into the crowd and trying to punt as many people as possible into the lava. I'd 'protect the runts' on our healers, and try to keep them out of harms way, but the numbers flying off this guy's head really has no meaning for me, because I never enabled scrolling combat text for Warhammer, so I dunno how hard each swing of my 2h axe was really hitting for.

Where's the footage of leet Shaman DPS from Warhammer? I have a level 18ish Shaman in Warhammer, and looking at the DPS trees, it looked like every talent's tooltip should have just read "DON'T WASTE A POINT HERE, YOU'RE A HEALER, DOOD".

: /

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Layout Adjustments, Like Anyone Cares

This is just a test post mostly... My rants tend to ramble on for a good portion of screen real estate, and I kinda missed the "here's the intro, click the link to read the full story" kinda thing we had going at NotAddicted. I've dug around and found a hack that allows me to split stories in half, and have a 'teaser' + 'read more...' thing going on. I'm a lazy web surfer myself, and usually skip visiting sites I like for a few days at a time, and when I go back it's good to be able to 'catch up' and see what I've missed. I've adjusted the front page layout to use this new system, and show my ten most recent... uhh... whatevers (ramblings? articles? bouts of pissing and moaning?). And yes, that's the image that showed up on the first page of google images for "teaser". : /

Blah blah blah, this is body text! Look at me, I'm an MMO story! Yadda yadda yadda, nerf ret pallies, blah blah blah, mutilate with no positional requirement is haxx, do dee doo de doo, QQ about the mail system lol blizz sux, and apparently I've stopped playing warhammer...?

So yeah. This is just a demo to poke under the hood and see how bad it broke all of my stuff. Real article coming later; I apparently have been selected to judge a junior high school english speech contest today.

blehhh...

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Where's My Steak Knife?

I need to stab myself in the face real quick. As anyone entrenched in WoW knows, there's like an 800 hour downtime going right now because:

1) Blizz crapped all over the mail system

and

B) apparently 'locks got free season 2 sets (they could buy them from the Honor Vendor for freesies).

Point #B leads to a bunch of retards on the internet getting all self righteous and proclaiming that anyone who purchased the items 'are totally asking for a banning', and 'if only no one looted the free items', there would somehow not be this downtime.

Hate to bring up old shits, but remember the Heroic Underbog bug? Where you could pull the Black Stalker with a warlock pet? For a good 3 weeks that's the ONLY WAY THAT SHIT GOT RUN. Not by me alone, by every server I had toons on. It was the generally accepted way, SERVER WIDE, to get a free roll on a nether and whatever drops the BS offered.

LFM Heroic UB, got a lock, last boss only, PST

That was the LFG channel back then. If Blizzard puts huge piles of gold in the center of the XR, then expects people to show restraint, then they're going to be surprised at the results I guess. It's a good thing you can't DE or vend PvP gear, or it would probably be trickier to sort out. I can't get enough of dipshits on Twitter acting high and mighty, people QQing in the forums about this day that was 'taken from them thanks to greed', or whiny WOWInsider posts asking the big moral questions aimed at today's youth.

I need a beer. Ugh.

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The Currency of the Future! Playstation 3s!

I have a strange way of going about rationalizing purchases, and I figure I can't be alone in the way I do this. Whenever anything costs 'a lot' of money, I break it down (justify?), and say to myself "well, I bought a PS3 for 300 dollars, and look at how worthless that ended up being".

My new camera that I bought came to a grand total of 64,500 yen, which is roughly 'two playstation 3s', and I've probably already gotten twice as much entertainment out of its ownership. For the price of one PS3, I could buy an MMO, and subscribe to it for over a year! Smaller items (pants, a nice shirt) are judged in the cost of console games: "These pants are pretty comfortable, I could get away with wearing them at work, and they cost less than Little Big Planet did!"

The biggest mystery is that I don't really even play console games much anymore. All these games are such slop that I can only thank god I didn't bother spending money to realize I have no interest in playing them. I own all the major consoles, and it's seriously enough entertainment for me to just play the one level demos, and never go back and play them again. While there are a few standouts (yes I bought Mario Galaxy and Little Big Planet), there are so many that just... don't... do it for me.

Why I gauge non-gaming purchases in this way has always seemed a little strange, but I can't be the only one that does this... I mean, right?


In a totally unrelated note, while looking around on google for a PS3 image for the header, I came across > this <.

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Vista = Blows. Windows 7 = ?

I'm disappointed, but I'm not sure exactly where the full extent of the disappointment lies. It's kinda all over the map on this one...

I'm (continuously) disappointed in Windows Vista, and have been ever since it officially launched. That I actually bought it willingly, in Japan, for many yen is disappointing. I was disappointed in hardware manufacturers for pretending to be caught off guard by Vista's release, when I personally had the beta a year before it ever launched. More disappointing is the fact that my Vista install disc just sits in my software binder, doing ... nothing. For a long time, I had my main rig set to dual boot it and XP, but I gave up ever deciding which I'd boot into during a power cycle; and had, in fact, shortened the time allotted to making that decision to a mere 5 seconds so my computer just get on with loading XP that much faster.

Game performance in XP versus Vista is night and day (or afternoon and evening at the very least), and there is precisely ZERO reason to ever boot into Vista, given the choice between the two operating systems. A cuter start menu and shinier version of Windows Media Player do not a "revolutionary breakthrough in Windows" make. Directx 10 was supposed to be some big deal, and ... uhh... that sentence doesn't even really require a proper ending.

I'm disappointed in the 18 versions of Vista they tried to shove down everyone's throats (Ultimate, Regular, Uber Duber, That Version With the Bagel Toaster, The One You Can't Do Shit With), was disappointed that my laptop came preinstalled with Vista on it, and was extremely disappointed when Toshiba tried to pretend XP drivers for my laptop didn't exist. The biggest disappointment had to be the Big Fucking Screaming Orc Sticker plastered on my laptop that proclaimed it to be a 'gaming system', and how miserably it failed at gaming until a full year later when they released the second (and probably final) graphics driver that addressed the following...

Corrected issues from previous versions

1. When installed on Satellite P100/P105 computers with BIOS 4.20, display driver 7.15.11.5666 improves "video stuttering" during game play, and 3D performance.

...especially after they denied there was a problem for a good 12 months (and, no, vanilla geforce drivers didn't work, because they didn't recognize the proprietary Toshiba cooling system, and would just overheat the card if used). Toshiba finally allowed you to install XP over Vista, then call Microsoft and tell them you bought a laptop with Vista preinstalled, and wished to downgrade your license to XP. When asked were I was supposed to come up with an XP CD and serial for the install, Toshiba actually 'wished me luck with that' on the phone. I suppose Toshiba can't just come right out and say 'torrent that fucker, and grab a keygen while you're at it' over the phone, but I'm pretty sure that it was implied.

On top of all of this, I was disappointed to find recently that Microsoft has already given up on Vista and moved on to the newer (and shinier) "Windows 7" ...nevermind the fact that this isn't the seventh version of Windows by any stretch of the imagination. To think how foolish I was buying the original Vista, and thinking 'well, at least I'll be good on this one for a while, and can stop calling Microsoft support to activate each time I reinstall XP'. Haha! Got me on that one; I called Microsoft just the other day when I fucked up my system, and decided it would probably just be for the better to reinstall and wipe the drives anyway. I actually tried to just install Vista from scratch, but was told the installer wouldn't run from a clean drive, I had to launch it from inside XP, since I purchased a lol-grade.

Here's how upgrading to Vista works: You put the disc in your drive (in XP), point the installer to your hard drive, and it formats the drive after a reboot. That's the clean way to do it. Otherwise you can overwrite your old install, and you end up with a bunch of shit on your drive like a "Windows.OLD" folder that serves no purpose, and a fucked up registry that just laughs at you when you try to launch previously installed applications. God forbid your drive is already formatted. You'd have to install XP, then erase the install. I installed it previously to a D: partition, and while that worked (C: was still XP), every app I'd install would try and install to the C drive, and it was just a pain in the ass. Hmm, here's an idea: how about I just install XP, and then just use that instead of fucking around with Vista at all? Sound good?

But here's the biggest disappointment of all: I downloaded this mysterious new Windows 7 beta off a torrent on a whim, and installed it over my old Vista partition, since after installing XP last time it destroyed my dual boot menu system anyway, and there was a free partition doing nothing on my system. Imagine my surprise when it not only installed from boot to the second partition, but went ahead and called that partition C as well! It even did a neat trick where it doesn't even mount the XP drive while Windows 7 is active, to prevent novice users from seeing two drives with \windows folders, and getting them confused on where to install things. There's an honest to god difference in the taskbar layout, and a general feeling of 'this is different than XP'. I didn't bother reading up on all the new features, but have just stumbled across many on my own, without being told how to use them.

I'm not retarded, and know that ridiculously intelligent people work at Microsoft. You don't get to be Microsoft by just hamfisting shit into a box and hoping it sells, which is why Vista threw me for a loop. Just when XP finally became solid and functional (I remember XP's launch too, it wasn't exactly lollipops and sunshine), along comes Vista to fuck it all up again. There wasn't anything drastically radical about Vista, though, I just figured it was time for a new OS. Windows 7 feels different, though... I mean, really... how different can something be, and still be Windows? Remember how the sidebar was supposed to be this awesome thing that was going to replace the taskbar? It was one of the first things most people disabled. Remember how UAC was going to revolutionize security? I love reading articles where they still insist that having it enabled is a good thing. It's such a huge pain in the ass that it's the second thing I disable. I also use Linux as root, so sue me. Having a retarded dialog box pop up asking "HEY IS THIS OK?" and then having an OK button right fucking there to push isn't going to rescue anyone from ruining their system, in the same way that making me enter the root password every time I want to do something useful in Linux isn't going to make me change my mind about whatever I was going to do in the first place.

7, while not earth shattering, has a few cool little features. There's one where you can pin items directly to the taskbar, and when you hover over them, you see any instances open, and clicking and dragging upwards (I have no idea how I even came across this, I think it was just accident) pulls up a handy menu showing honest to god useful shortcuts for that item... here's the shortcut menu for explorer shown to the right... it's not really showcasing what I'm talking about, but maybe you get the idea. It's not just making a shortcut to launch the item, it's creating a mini version of the program that offers simple uses that you can access without having to launch a full instance of it. I'm writing this on my laptop, so I can't just pop off some screenshots, but the interface for Windows 7 actually feels like it makes sense in a new way, instead of just being a more shiny (and slower) version of XP.

OH BUT IXO! I THOUGHT YOU WERE DISAPPOINTED IN WINDOWS 7! That's the thing... I'm actually disappointed in myself for seriously liking it. I've been so dismally upset about dealing with Vista, that I'm ashamed of myself for having any kind of faith that this will somehow be different. I'm sure I'll still be chugging along on XP in 2012, playing WoW 3, and downloading ancient MP3 files to listen to west coast gangster rap albums from 1993.

If Vista has had one redeeming moment, it would be the fact that my Vista RC1 key that I receieved from Microsoft oh so long ago (June 9th, 2006 says gmail) actually works for the Windows 7 betas floating around, and allow me to legitimately activate my copy, letting Windows 7 work for a year instead of only 30 days. It's pretty sad that I'll probably get more use out of a release candidate for Windows 7 than I will from the final retail copy of Vista I purchased.

:(

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Newsflash! WAR Isn't Really PVP

I'm not the first person to have noticed this, but I'm not sure if it's really sunk in for anyone in the general gaming public. People still go on and on about how Warhammer's PvP is what makes the game so blatantly different from WoW, and then people go off on tirades saying that WoW is totally ripping off Warhammer, because they (Mythic) "get PvP".

While I'm all for competition in the marketplace, and certain elements being borrowed from other games, Warhammer isn't the huge revolution everyone is making it out to be.

For those pissed that WoW is going to 'steal' Warhammer innovations like PvP XP, or queueing for battlegrounds from anywhere, I invite you to reread those last 5 words before the comma again. Queueing for BATTLEGROUNDS from anywhere. BGs are hardly some big revolutionary idea that Warhammer had, they just slapped a lamer word on them that's harder to abbreviate and pretended like it was clever. While I applaud their intent to offer 'more than 4', the other day I was shocked (shocked!) to find myself in something other than Tor Anroc. I know there are three available, but in my ENTIRE time in tier 3, I've played 'the dam one' once, and I think my entire team were dam virgins as well, because we got the barrel thing and didn't even know what to do with it. The entire round devolved into just random fighting, because no one bothered to read the load screen, and everyone was so amazed by the lack of lava.

That's two. I still don't even know what the third one is.

Battlegrounds aside (which I don't really consider to be 'pee vee pee' in the way WAR IS EVERYWHERE intended it to mean, let's take a look at RvR, the big kahuna.

Hmm... taking a keep can be done with 4 people, assuming no one on the other faction is there to stop you, and even then, it's an excercise in (gasp!) PvE mechanics. Tank the 4 champs and hero, peel champs one at a time (or just AoE, whatever), heal the tanks and DPS, collect renown. Grats, you just fought Moroes, but he was in a 'keep', and had less abilities. Even if the other side is there to stop you, the basic strategy involves CCing (or ignoring completely) the opposing faction, and just killing the NPC.

Even the super duper endgame 'city taking' is a PVE affair. To quote Tobold (who's basically paraphrasing Saylah):

And then the endgame consists of first avoiding enemy players by attacking them when they sleep, and then a phase in which BY DESIGN the enemy players are locked out of their city, and the attackers play a big PvE raid public quest to kill NPC defenders and ultimately the king. So at best this is half-half PvP and PvE. And if you attack early enough it becomes 99% PvE. It's like playing WoW on a PvP server, where you might need to do a little PvP to get into the raid instance, but once you are in there, it's only PvE.

Sweet. Awesome PvP you got there.

To say this is constrained to Warhammer is silly, but to say Warhammer's PvP (RvR, XyZ, whatever) 'rises above WoW's implementations' in any way is ridiculous.

Taking a look at WoW's PvP offerings, Arena is the only thing that even comes close, because it eliminates NPCs from the scene. Taking a look at Alterac Valley, why do you suppose everyone just runs past each other?

Because the point is to kill the NPC.

As long as THAT is the goal, there will never be meaningful conflict. Here's a shocking idea: make AV have a capture point. Get ten players to channel a spell for ten seconds in a shared altar in the direct center of the field of strife, and whoever can pull it off first wins. Why a shared altar? Because if they were in the opposing player's bases, we'd just run past each other again, duh. It needs to be something to FIGHT over, even if it just devolves into a huge zerg.

I don't mind zergs... zergs are fucking fun. Cut out all the bullshit in the map... hell, make AV the size of WSG, but just no flag capping. 40 players to a side, WSG mapsize, zerg-a-lerg-a-ding-ding GO. With so many peple in such CLOSE PROXIMITY to one another, I think a few spells would start to go off, and people might accidentally attack each other in the rush to click the altar. God forbid a chain reaction occurs, and people actually begin to fight. :(

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Got a New Camera

Not much going on recently. But since this is now officially a BLOG, I can post whatever I want and just say it falls under the "whatever..." section listed above :)

I bought a new highish end digital SLR this weekend (Canon Kiss X2, also known as a Rebel XSi or EOS 450D in other countries), after being really impressed by my big brother's flickr page. I knew he was getting into photography back in the states, but didn't know the actual extent of how far he'd come until I actually sunk my teeth in and dug around on his page. My wife loves taking photos as well, but was pretty limited with what she could do with the Canon IXY point and shoot I got her for her birthday last year. Plus we got a 2 month old in the house now, so taking pictures in low light and having them look good was a good excuse to drop six bills on a fancy new gadget ;)

At this point, I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed by all the options available, and loving every second of it. If there's one thing I love sinking my teeth into it's a complicated piece of electronics, and figuring out what all the switches and dials do. The fact that it's 'half mechanical' as well, and actually does things in the real world, only adds to the cool factor. By that I mean that you don't just run around in cyberspace using it, but actually get out of your chair and go look at the world outside. That's actually one of the features I think I'm going to enjoy the most, as I'm finding myself with less and less to do in the house, and tiring of just staring at a monitor during my leisure time. Logging into the usual suspects is feeling forced recently, and while maybe Wrath will bring a bit of fresh air, I'm seriously thinking that it won't. My one level 70 is an affliction Warlock all the way down to Haunt, and PvPing in WoW, while a refreshing break from Warhammer, is just being one or two shotted by anything that walks by. Ret pallies, Titan grip Warriors, and Dagger Rogues are just retarded right now. I'm not really complaining, because I don't really care, but if i did care, I imagine I'd be pretty pissed. I seriously got ambushed for 4300+, followed by a 2.5k mutilate the other day. Rogues don't even need to bother kidney shotting, I die before cheapshot wears off 95% of the time. PvE is pointless right now with voidwalkers tanking Illidan, and gear being replaced soon anyway, and PvP is... yeah... Battlegrounds. On the other hand, going out of the house usually involves just spending money (case in point: buying a camera), but now it'll be cool to go outside and just look for cool things to shoot.

Gaming, and more specifically WoW, has been my 'hobby' for quite a while. While I still find the concept of gaming to be interesting (and likely always will), it just seems like I've hit a dead spot. MMOs have destroyed the enjoyment of single player games for me (it all feels pointless), and the current MMO market is just stagnant. A lot of my recent articles have been concerned with what I think could make some pretty sweeping changes to the genre, but will we ever see anything like 'my ideal MMO'? A game where combat is a slow, inventory space is limited, crafting takes time, and there are no 'gear requirements' would fall flat on its face in the public's eye, even if there was a vocal minority who applauded its bold new direction. Are we doomed to play increasingly watered down versions of the same game until the MMO market pulls an Atari 2600 on itself and collapses? Where is the NES of MMOs to rescue the genre? Do I really care at this point? Why am I complaining about MMOs at the end of my 'Hooray, I bought a new cool camera' post?

bleh...

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