After last week’s tank-parison, this week it’s tank-pug-hell:

• Spinks encounters the dreaded Knockback Man! Lots of yelling ensues.
• Tarsus groups with people who don’t understand corners. More yelling.
• Tamarind on the other hand has an against-all-odds ICC PUG success. No yelling required!
• protflashes also has a delightful RFC PUG - despite earning the Huntard title mid run :-)
• Scattered Shots retaliates by creating an Extreme Solo Hunter spec. No Huntard here.
• Still Huntering, sad to hear Pike is leaving WoW - but great news that it’s for positive reasons.
• Syp realises raiding hurts his head.
• Great Bear 101 Guide by Allison Robert, easily the best writer on wow.com

And Devo are back! Fantastic Mark Mothersbaugh interview from 2008 on Phawker too, for those that want to dig deeper. Which is everyone, right?

---

---

11.5 million players. 74 Big Love Rockets.

---

---

I’m plodding around Azeroth on Kodo in pursuit of my Elder title, visiting all sorts of far flung places with nary a soul around. Other than other Achievement seekers, of course. Which is kind of sad - Ashzara for example is a beautiful zone, populated by precisely no-one, all the lonely NPCs in tears waiting for someone to kill or appreciate them. Thankfully Cataclysm brings the Bilgewater Cartel goblins to Ashzara, who make their home there.

In any case, the Lunar Festival is a nice leisurely journey, and it certainly brings home the ginormous size of the world. It also illustrates one of the fundamentals of playing: the metagame. The idea of attempting the Lunar or any other festival without resources like wow.com or Wowhead is frankly unimaginable:

Bane: Hey there, guy-with-a-great-huge-halo-shooting-up-in-the-sky, how you doing?

GWAGHHSUITS: *spinning around with enthusiasm* Hail oh great PC! Thanks for visiting me. In fact, you know what - have this artfully crafted coin!

Bane: Whoa, thanks old guy! Hey - are there more of you ‘Elders’ around?

GWAGHHSUITS: Sure are - and they’ll give you free stuff too!

Bane: Great! I should go visit them. Um, where are they?

GWAGHHSUITS: There’s one somewhere in a dungeon somewhere. And another in a place you’ve never heard of. Just nearby. Kind of. *looks shiftily around while scuffing the ground with his worn leather boots*

Bane: Ummm, can you be more specific?

GWAGHHSUITS: Nope! Good luck! /ignore*quickly turns his back on the annoying PC*

Bane: …

Of course it would be possible to find all the Elders, but it would be a royal pain too.  I guess someone once did it da solo, and more power to them, but players with that much perseverance are few and far between.

Whilst you could argue this means the game isn’t complete somehow, it seems more likely that this enormous community pool of knowledge that has formed around Warcraft is one of the things that makes the game, as BigBearButt observed. It’s social networking, and it’s been around since before that term became the property of Big Business™.

The amount of free info and time that people have committed to Wowhead and Wowwiki is phenomenal. It’s created a community of contributers, bloggers, editors, Auctioneers and passionate players. I barely move in game before referring to LightHeaded, zooming off as directed via TomTom, or using the Lunar Festival pack for TourGuide. In many other games this would be cheating. And maybe the boss encounters suffer a bit from needing guides rather than teaching. But I’d argue that overall, the metagame makes WoW miles more fun - it doesn’t reduce the challenge, just the frustration.

---

Read it and weep:

• It’s Tank-parison week: BBB covers Druids vs Paladins, WoW in an Hour looks at Paladins vs Warriors.
• Achtung Panzercow on new 80’s tanking Heroics in LFD
• BioBreak has LFD struggles before catching purple fever, Tobold doesn’t agree it’s a struggle, and no-one is following my Normal Mode plan :-)
• Tankspot on LK Hard Mode progressions, and Cat predictions
• Jump on Contact present a nice infographic on the real world cost of EVE Online ships
• Interesting new site from Epic Advice, EpicPlan.com allows you to map out your Boss strategies
• Critical QQ psychoanalyses WoW’s in/competent players
• Righteous Orbs picks the wrong toon name
• Official factoids: 70% of trial players don’t get past level 10, and WoW’s 11.5 million playerbase is exactly the same as a year ago

And today’s offtopic, Music Machinery works out who the real drummers are.

---

---

Banehammer is now officially a Fool for Love, having cleared the final two hurdles last night.

The first was to get a nice bouquet of roses from the first boss in UK, Prince Keleseth. Because the roses only drop off the Prince and only for one person, doing it via LFD was fated to be a ‘ninja/drop’ disaster. So we guild ran it with our Rogue, our Hunter, and me. No heals, but I guess not surprisingly it was challenge on normal mode, given the mobs are ~70 elites and the boss not much more. We even two manned it for a second run, just me and the Hunter. We employed ice traps, misdirects, and much hilarity ensued.

The last achievement was to set off 10 Love Rockets in 20 seconds. I’d already burned through 25 of the @#$@# things and not got the ding, so this time I disabled all my add-ons, turned the graphics down to Vic-20 level, and went to an isolated pocked of Mulgore. Success!

The next festival on the list is the Lunar Festival. I’m really enjoying doing each one that comes up, having previously had no real interest. Planning what you’ve got to do, working out the most efficient way, and just the general design of the various quests is all good fun. I’m don’t even mind the PVP quests, I always intend to just zone in and do the Achievement, but tend to get caught up in the fight despite my appalling PVP noobness. For the Horde!

---