My two copper on... the pre-expansion blues.

So I've kinda fallen off the planet (blogosphere?) for a while, and more than likely no one reads this blog, so no one knew and therefore no one cared, but for the sake of my ego I shall pretend a great many WoW players missed me and my blog.

So where have I been? I took a small hiatus from WoW, went to BlizzCon (which was amazing by the way), and started playing WoW again and leveling more alts.

More alts?! 


In the words of Ichoron, I will not be contained!


NYAGH! 


Aside from that various RL problems have been kicking me in the teeth lately (due to roommate friction issues my fiancé and I are moving into our own apartment in 9 days, I haven't found consistent work as of yet, etc.)  and the hundred thousand things I could have posted about in this blog went woooosh~!

My two copper on... goals, and completing them.

As I tweeted up there, my Orc Warrior on Moon Guard is now level 80, giving me a total of 8 characters that are at max level. I did end up being a day shy of my inital goal of getting her to max level before the end of the Midsummer Fire Festival, but to be honest I think I did the best I could and it ended up rather well. I mean, I still had raiding obligations on my Priest to fulfill, and I still attended RP events on both my warrior and my druid, and occasionally I logged over to my druid just to RP with some people and take a break. I think some people initally thought I had purchased a powerleveling service, until I talked a lot to them while leveling.

So this means with my warrior at max level, once I start getting her some respectable gear together, I'm going to split my time between my druid on Moon Guard (my druid's guildmaster might kill me in my sleep if I don't start leveling her soon) and my Pocket Posse gnome on Doomhammer. Ironically enough, I left them both off at level 22.

In addition to that, my fiancé has decided that, since I am his housewench, I should level his alts, too. And since I have trouble denying that man anything (within reason, of course) I now have a few MORE alts on my list to level. I'm really glad that I find leveling to be one of the best parts of the WoW experience - though even I can get a bit tired of it. Sometimes.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself once all my alts hit max level. Although I know when Cataclysm is released I will be rolling at least 4 Worgens - Warrior, Hunter, Mage, and Warlock. From what I've heard from friends that have got into the beta (lucky bastards!) the Worgen starter quests are epic and the lore is awesome. I'm excited.

My two copper on... patch 3.3.5 and the Battle.net RealID.

Since it's patch day (which also equates to Apartment Cleaning Day, but not at 6:00am, not so sure the roommate would appreciate me clanging around with the dishes or vacuuming right now.) I can not log in at the moment, which finally gives me time to blog. I've been a busy little small stinging flying insect with a couple projects that I've piled onto myself. First there is the Pocket Posse, and Zyrinxie is now sitting at level 22. However, since I still have quite a while remaining to complete that particular character before the time limit expires (I'm giving myself until Oct. 15, though the official deadline is Oct. 22) it has actually been put to the side for a much shorter time-limit project.

It started with me trying, on a level 42 warrior, to capture the flames of the enemy capitals. I didn't mind dying to the guards as I made my way there, I expected nothing else. What infuriated me was the players, specifically hunters, warlocks, and unholy death knights, that were camping the fire with their pets on aggressive. After dying a few more times I gave up, and then vowed in my guild's OOC chat channel that I would be 80 before the end of the Midsummer Fire Festival and I would hunt down every Alliance hunter, warlock, and death knight...and cleave them to death. I then proceeded to get 6 levels in a day, and being in the late 40s that's no small feat. I'm running out of places to level. Though a few people commented that Northrend will slow me down, I did not agree. I can go from 68-80 in the course of 2-3 days, if I focus hard on it. The hardest part, what I've found to ALWAYS be the largest slowdown is where I'm sitting right now, 48-58... so close to no longer being in the Old World but at the same time still stuck there with nothing but the most irritating zones left to quest in. This quest, of course, overrides my previous project on that particular character, which was to get the "of the Horde" title prior to hitting 80. Titles can wait, the time for vengeance is NOW.

This project has cause me to put my druid on that server on hold, and as I explained to my guild master of that particular guild (my warrior and druid are in similar but different guilds), I promised I would pick up my druid once my warrior was 80 and I had completed my Vengeance Objective. He wasn't entirely pleased with this turn of events, but since I said I'd hop on my druid for guild meetings and events, he seemed okay with it. Although I did give him the option of shelling out the $55 to transfer my alliance druid from Argent Dawn and faction transfer her, he declined. Bahaha.

So, now on to the topic of the...topic of this blog post. With patch 3.3.5 going live today, the RealID thing is also going live. I've read numerous opinions on it, ranging from rage to pleasure, and taking the time to think about it... I like it. I can see why those people who don't like it are against it (privacy and security issues, etc. Some people on Moon Guard even expressed concerns about their friends / guildmates / significant others finding out about their Goldshire ERP alts...to which I chuckled. ) but for me personally, I think it's a good idea. For example, I have one friend left on Warsong that I still try to catch online to talk to, but I don't get the chance to near as much as I would like. He also doesn't get the chance to roll an alt on Argent Dawn to talk to me and, on top of that, I'm pretty much damn near impossible to track down. Not that I intend to be, mind you, but my alts make me a pain in the ass to track. He already knows my real name (which is not something I  keep hidden under wraps for any reason, I really don't care if people know what my name is. ) and he told me his real name but for the life of me I can't remember what it is. He's just...Tohs.

In addition to him there are numerous friends on Argent Dawn that I don't like having to log onto my paladin or tab out and use AIM to talk to - case in point would be That Priest. And I have no issue giving out the email address I use for my battle.net account - I rarely check that particular email account so if I get spam on it, oh well. Not to mention, to the crowd that cries out in righteous indignation that giving someone your b.net account name is half the information they need to hack your account and steal all your epix, I have an authenticator. So if one of my RealID friends turned out to be a douchenozzle, well, they still can't get into my account.

In addition to that point, many people have brought up that, people on your RealID friendslist can see you on ANY character, including your super-secret "I'm mad at all my friends and guildmates" alt that they log on to play in peace. Although at that point my suggestion would be if you're so upset with people ingame that you have to hide on an alt....there's a little button that says "Logout". Go watch a movie or something and chill out. It'll do you some good.

Maybe I'm a bit too lax about my information being secure, but I don't see this being the sign of the coming apocalypse or anything. Am I going to RealID everyone I meet in-game? No. I will, however, RealID friends I've known for a long time, or people that I reasonably trust. And for those friends of mine that decline to use the RealID service, I will respect that decision.

Two Copper Commentary Special - The Pocket Posse 1-80 Leveling Challenge, part one

In a topic relating to an offhand comment I made in my last post, I mentioned having more time than money and therefore more ability to level alts. Well, while looking over the BlizzCon forums (Since for some reason this year I want to get much more involved in the community) I came across this thread and decided that I would participate and document my adventures in my blog. And so, therefore, I present to you...

Zyrinxie the Warlock! /cheer

Now, in the spirit of a challenge, I rolled on the server of the person hosting the challenge, which is Doomhammer. I don't know anyone on Doomhammer, I have no gold and all my heirlooms are on Moon Guard. So therefore, we take our gear upgrades where we can get them. 

Wait, this has MORE armor than my other robe? 

As soon as I was able, I bought my Imp summon. I gotta admit, I like it being buyable as opposed to something I have to do a quest for. Although 95c can be kinda...expensive. 

And then I end up with an imp named Quzqua. I call him QQ for short. 

But QQ is as steadfast a demon that any beginning Warlock could ask for, complaining all the while while I let the beasts kill -him- instead of -me-. Fantastic. 

QQ even helped me fool that silly dwarf!

I'm not sure I feel right about bribing that other guy with booze...ah, what do I care? I do bad things, I'm a warlock. Fooling an alcoholic dwarf to switch out booze is -nothing- compared with ripping people's souls out their nose.  

And what do we do with souls?

Yeah, it's like that. 

So Zyrinxie is now level 10 and I will certainly be working on Part two, 11-20, soon. I actually have, now that I look, a -lot- of unleveled alts, and I look forward to leveling all of them. 

My two copper on...forums and old friends.

On a completely aside note and not exactly what I had intended to start with, sometimes when one is trying to make a blog post and one's significant other wants a backrub, things can get a bit...sigh. I love this man to death but backrubs can wait.

Moving on from that, recently I made a forum thread @ That Priest expressing my undying love for her and posting a link to a screenshot showing my priest sitting on a bench outside Silvermoon City. 

D'aww, look, she's all alone. 

As is the case with things posted on the realm forums, other people got involved, including one of my old Alliance friends who recently started playing nearly exclusively on her Horde rouge professing her undying love for my priest, and my priest shunning her because Arcane Torrent is terrible and it makes her have a sad. 

Then there was The Tank, who made PvP related comments. Since he is primarily Horde and I am primarily Alliance, naturally we cross paths in Wintergrasp and, during the actual battle, I treat all my Horde friends the same way I treat everyone Hordeside. 

Please don't hurt me.

We had some good-natured banter back and forth, as is usually the case between the two of us and, in the course of the conversation it had come up that he had taken a piece of my immolated flesh to That Priest, and said piece was a boob. Which I really didn't take offense to or feel threatened by, I merely commented that there was no problem with that since everyone knows boobs are for motorboating. 

A day or two later, after some more commentary back and forth, I refreshed the thread only to find that it was deleted. I was distraught and contacted That Priest via AIM so we could share our sorrow about our lovethread going kerploffle. 

I was logged on my paladin so I could talk with a one of my fine feathered friends and The Tank asks me if I'm the one who reported the post, to which I responded no, and then informed me of the 72 hour banhammer he got for "threatening [me] with serious bodily harm". 

Err...what? 

I didn't feel even remotely threatened by what he said, and if I had, my fiancé would have interjected and would have kindly told him (or anyone else who threatened me, for that matter) to gtfo and possibly eat a mountain of male reproductive organs. 

The forum moderators need to either harvest some common sense or a sense of humor. I'm good with either. 

In other forum-related news, as just about everyone knows, BlizzCon tickets have come and gone for the second time, selling out just as fast as the first. The rage threads are endless on the BlizzCon forum regarding queuing issues and eBay scalpers and just how Blizzard is a terrible company for offering limited tickets to their own event and ruined people's honeymoon because they couldn't get a ticket and blah. There was one person who actually threatened suicide if they didn't get to go (thread has since been deleted) and someone who, in their bitterness regarding not being able to get a ticket, wished that everyone who gets to go has a terrible time. 

I'm not entirely sure why people think that complaining like that is even remotely deserved. Blizzard did nothing wrong as a company, it's a very popular event in a place with a limited capacity. I notice people saying "This is the second year in a row I've missed BlizzCon tickets! Clearly the problem is Blizzard's ticket system!" 

No sweetheart, I regret to inform you that...

I have no idea why I'm making this post so image heavy. I'll blame it on the fact that I started this at roughly 4 in the morning and I am le tired. And in being such, I like pictures. They're pretty! 

For the second part of my post, I was surfin' good ol' Facebook last night when I came across a post that an old guildmate of mine from Back In The Day was playing her holy paladin again and lamenting the difference in gear from when she quit (mid-Ulduar) to now. About 5 seconds worth of digging and I found out that she had indeed server transfered to Tortheldrin, where her brother plays and runs a fairly successful guild from what she tells me. 

Since I have a lack of disposable income and a surplus of spare time, instead of moving my Horde paladin off of Argent Dawn or realm/faction transferring one of my Alliance characters, I elected to start anew yet again, although my heirloom gear will probably remain on Moon Guard until cross-server mailing becomes available. Heirlooms are nice because it's armor / weapon slots I don't have to worry about upgrading as I go along (not to mention the +20% exp buff) but they're not critical to leveling - I've done it enough times that I'm fairly sure I have a decent grasp of the fastest leveling spots for both factions. And for me, bleeding edge content isn't my goal - the leveling experience is a good portion of my enjoyment in this game. (I know, I'm crazy). 

The interesting part about Tortheldrin is it is a realm with two no-longer-familiar features - 1) a PvP server and 2) and not an RP server. I'm not used to having to watch my back for hostile players all the time, but it might be a refreshing change of pace. I'm starting there with a death knight, since they start at 55 and it's a solid class for building a backbone for alts - it's very easy to farm things on a death knight, especially while still in Outland. 

We'll see how it goes. 

My two copper on...PvP behavior.

I come from a server where the population balance leans heavily to the Alliance, and thus the Horde have problems taking / keeping Wintergrasp for any significant amount of time. It's been that way for as long as I've been on Argent Dawn - I started there as Alliance on low-level characters, but then I transfered my Tauren Shaman and my Blood Elf Priest over as well as a couple higher-level Alliance toons I had chilling around on other servers, therefore condensing all my characters on one server. Faction transfers for raid spots happened and eventually it got to the point where it is now - all of my characters, with the exception of my paladin and a low-level warrior alt, are Alliance.

But during the time that I was Horde, I became acquainted with many players that, despite my time being primarily spent on the other faction now, I still consider friends.

Lately the guy who seems to be single-handedly able to rally the Horde into an organized group for PvP returned after a hiatus for real life reasons, and lately the Horde has been holding Wintergrasp more consistently. Which is great, fantastic for them. Despite the fact that my pally is horde, I hardly play her - I'm not too fond of melee classes in general and my healing gear needs a lot of work. My lack of anything really to hold me to that faction doesn't help - I don't know many people in the guild my paladin is in outside of the core officer team and I do not currently raid with them in any capacity. I'm just...kinda there, when I log in, have a few conversations with people via tells, and then get bored and log off.


So taking all this into consideration, lately when the Horde loses Wintergrasp they have elected to start camping the entrance to VoA, in a seeming attitude of "If we can't have it, you can't either." I have a good number of friends in this group and this is where the trouble lies. Doing it once or twice, okay. Doing it after a match where they lost by mere seconds? Yeah, I can see that.

Doing it over and over, after just about every lost match?

I regret to say that, even though people very near and dear to me are doing it, I can not justify the behavior. And this is where my heart aches. I don't like thinking negative things about people I care about and I'm non-confrontational (which might be an odd trait for a PvPer) and being so annoyed with people that matter to me makes me want to cry in real life.

I could justify it if it was occasional. But this? No. In my opinion it's like a spoiled, bratty child who breaks another kid's toy just because they weren't allowed to play with it when they wanted to. Admittedly the Alliance population of Argent Dawn isn't very good at sharing this particular toy, but the point remains.

But, you might say, you play Alliance. So of course it would seem that way to you. 


I thought about that. Honestly, I'm not typing this in a fit of nerdrage - I've managed to do my weekly quests and VoAs around their camping and it hasn't really affected me personally, outside of my feelings regarding friends participating in it. Even if I was still primarily Horde and even if I did still PvP with that particular group, I wouldn't participate in this. In my opinion, when the Wintergrasp match is over, it's over - if you won, congratulations, have fun doing your VoA for the week. If you lose, tough luck, and try harder the next match. I've never been one for camping and griefing and inconveniencing other players, even when I played on a PvP server. Sure, I'd occasionally gank them once or maybe twice, or take part in EPIC BATTLES IN STRANGLETHORN, but I would leave after maybe 20-30 minutes.

Maybe I'm just too nice to be playing this game. But I don't find enjoyment in making people frustrated or annoyed or angry. I make a pretty bad forum troll, as you can imagine. I don't find it fun to have 22 people pounce on a one or two unsuspecting players that can't even react.

I did a Wintergrasp on my Horde paladin, and I think I've discovered part of the problem, besides just the raw population imbalance. The Horde keeps using the same tactics that they used to use when I was Horde. It was a moment of epic /facepalm for me, and here's why.

Imagine the Alliance population of AD as a giant. A very large, frothy giant that has a lot of bulk but not a lot of brain behind it. Then condition said giant by using the same tactics over and over and over. Then complain when that giant expects your tactics and beats the smaller you to a grisly pulp.

Moral of the story? Horde, you need to switch things up if you want to win Wintergrasp at a sane hour.

My two copper on...My favorite things. And other things.

So why a blog?

I'm tired of having an opinion on things related to Warcraft but not having the appropriate outlet by which to express these opinions. So I made a blog, and I made a twitter to go with the blog. And there you have it, I've hit the peak of trendiness! Ha ha ha!

But why "Two Copper Commentary", you might ask.

It comes from the phrase "that's just my two cents", and there's a Wikipedia entry about it here. But since this is a Warcraft blog, and cents = copper, there you have it.

Genius.

To kick things off I'm going to make my response to Ardol's Blog Azeroth Shared Topic for this week, which iiiissss~

My favorite things. Doesn't have to be Warcraft related, but what the hell, this is a Warcraft blog, might as well...

• Gnome female voice /emotes, specifically laughing and cheering. SO CUTE. Every time my warlock friend uses them I go "squeeeee!" IRL. My fiancé has since gotten used to this, the first couple times it happened he looked at me like I sprouted a second head. 
• Raptor mounts. It makes me sad that most of my max-level characters are Alliance and therefore the only raptor I have available to me is a rare drop from Zul'Gurub. Despite the fact that my priest is in love with That Priest who just happens to be a troll...yea. I tried to talk to the raptor handler in Sen'jin Village, but he just screamed like a ninny and summoned some guards. Jerk.
• Guild chat. Where would we be without it? 
• The random dungeon finder. I remember the days where the old LFG system would have 15 people sitting in queue for an hour for Heroic Utgarde Keep because no one thought to actually try to construct a group. It seems to me that the new system was Blizzard's answer to leading players to water and dunking their heads underwater until they started drinking or drowned. 
• Arenas. YES I SAID IT, I like to arena. Am I good at it? Pffft, no. I'm terrible, but damn is it fun. The fact that I arena with aforementioned fiancé, who tends to take things Way Too Seriously, actually increases my amusement value because sometimes when he nerdrages it's hilarious and oh man am I going to hell. 
• Organized Battlegrounds / World PvP. Because battlegrounds are only fun when you win. Trufax. 
• CASUAL -inserts massive amounts of emphasis- raiding. I like to think I'm good at this game and I've seen Icecream Citadel's insides, but I really don't want to spend untold hours of time and hundreds of gold on repairs wiping over and over and over again on some ridiculous hardmode. I'm not saying I have much going on outside the game right now ( /pathetic ) but I'd rather spend my time...not staring at the same boss for hours. I have a short attention span. 
• Being a healer. Although my currently most progressed character as far as ICC goes is a pure DPS class (my hunter), I really enjoy being a healer more. Why? I don't know. I tend to lose track of what I'm doing when I DPS and tanking is completely out of the question, despite my attempts to learn it. I'm currently running as a lowbie warrior tank for That Priest's druid alt since she was so tired of lowbie tanks that just were DOING IT WRONG. So I get to learn warrior tanking from the ground up. This promises to be interesting. 
• Roleplaying. My main two servers that I play on are Argent Dawn-US and Moon Guard-US. All of my characters on Argent Dawn, with the exception of my Paladin, are Alliance. All of my characters on Moon Guard, with the exception of my Paladin, are Horde. Both of those are Roleplaying servers, even though nowadays the RP for Argent Dawn more stands for Raid Progression.
• Helping other players. I love making people happy and helping them get where they want to go in the game. That's not to say I throw my gold (as if I ever HAVE any. Bahahahaha!) around freely, but say, if I have some old world herbs and I know someone needs them for leveling alchemy or inscription, I'll give them a portion of my stock. As opposed to scalping them on the Auction House. I'm too nice and therefore always broke. Le sigh. 

And with that, nonexistant readership, I bid thee good day, until the next time I get the urge to blog. Or Tweet. From my phone. TRENDY!