caps for cool control
Dec. 25th, 2007 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraque_bkMmm... quiet.
I was looking through my old LJ entries seeing what sorts of things I had posted on past Christmases. Holy crap, I used to be funny. I mean predictions for 2005, that was gold. I'm sure I'm not that funny anymore.
I also found that I wrote a fandom year in review post for 2005, which I imply that everyone else was doing, but I don't remember it at all. I am now going to review 2007 for no reason. Well really, so that I can look back on it and remember all this shit next year.
January
Kicked off BC as a charter member of my old guild, which we formed because we no longer liked our old old guild, which we came to Proudmoore to join in August 2006 because we no longer liked our old old old guild. Yes, I've been playing with basically the same core group of 10-15 people since 2005.
I either didn't take any screenshots on release day, or have since deleted them. The crowd in HFP was mind-blowing. And framerate-blowing. There were so many people it broke the dynamic spawn rate, causing the mobs outside Thrallmar to respawn as soon as they were engaged. I remember trying to do the fel orc quest in a group of 5 and barely surviving, and then the fel reaver comes tromping through and everyone runs for cover, training dozens of mobs behind them.
Then Vandy led us to Shattrath, where I promptly got lost, and then FAILED the intro quest because I saw something shiny and lost sight of the guardian NPC.
Then we rode into Nagrand to get the flight point, and the whole zone was completely deserted. The Murkblood riders ganked me. Then Vandy was showing us Halaa, which I guess we were the first to capture since it started out neutral when we arrived. (Zomg server first.)
I think the first person to 70 in our guild was Odo, on January 25 (so eight days after release). It was a close race, but Vandy and Vio fell behind by a couple of days for some real life reason that I don't remember.
January 25 is the first date WarcraftRealms shows Arymere guilded to DoA. It seemed like it had been longer since he left the game due to having the shit kicked out of him on the forums of our old guild.
February
I was not racing, so my hunter got to 70 on or about February 6. I don't have a screenshot or even remember exactly what I was doing, but I was in Blade's Edge with Seyjan. We did most of the late 60s together, hunter/shaman. It was fast and fun. Pets should come with their own Earth Shield.
During one of these sessions I was eating dinner and one of my wisdom teeth broke for no evident reason. I said to Seyjan, "I just broke a tooth." He said, "Are you okay?" I said, "Yeah, it doesn't hurt, let's keep going." (See also: December.)
I feel like a lot of people quickly forgot the drama that happened in mid-late February and into March, when it became clear that some people would not only level slowly, but also complain heavily about the fact that we hadn't waited for them and were not dropping everything to run them through Mana-Tombs. I couldn't understand this. If you wanted to be in the first wave of people going into KZ, that was REALLY up to you to take care of, and not up to others to drag you along.
It wasn't something that could be glossed over, it was horrible. People left over it. Remember when Vandy gquit and joined Detox, only to have Detox collapse, at which point he left the game for a while? Remember Odo inviting his three friends from somewhere else and then refusing to group or do anything without them? One night I was trying to suggest we should mix up the groups so we'd have the composition to run two simultaneous BM groups and get more people their attunement, to which he replied, "Well, MY friends and I are already attuned" which caused me to want to kill him IRL. Then they all rerolled on some low pop server somewhere and it was all my fault I think because I was so mean to him?
In retrospect it is hard to appreciate what we were getting worked up over, but this was a point where we had no gear, and BM was hard. I mean it was so hard it merited lengthy strategy threads on the guild forums. And every time a BM group failed, those were people whose mains weren't attuned, and another day we as a guild could not run KZ.
I distinctly remember Seyjan being like, "When everyone gets to 70 and is attuned we'll forget this stuff happened." Which turned out to be true, but not beneficial, because it was the same problem that would continue dogging the guild until the progression-oriented people left. (An oversimplification of what happened, but accurate enough.)
March
March 3 was our first KZ run. I guess we were about the third Proudmoore Horde guild into KZ, which is a pretty sad statement for the server really. We killed Attumen. Then I don't know, we cleared up to Moroes and wiped pitifully. I think we went to the basement, and someone asked why we were doing this, to which Emo said, and I am not making this up, "Because we are IN KARAZHAN."
We killed Moroes on the 11th. To accomplish this I respecced my hunter deep Survival so I could stand in one place and chain trap Rafe motherfucking Draugr without ever moving or risking him coming up. When your entire raid are in greens and blues, Moroes is hard. I am just saying.
We killed Maiden on the 26th. I don't really remember anything about the learning process, because there isn't anything to do or know unless you're a healer or a tank.
Also this month Emo (really Sheelba at the time) decided to reroll paladin because she missed her Alliance paladin that she was always bragging about. At this time she and I were friends, so I made a warlock to keep her company.
I also decided to start leveling my 60 priest for no real reason.
April
We beat Oz on the 2nd, Curator/Chess on the 16th, and Illhoof on the 30th. By "we" I mean the team now called Cerulean, to distinguish it from Team Purple which had its first KZ raid on the 6th.
Team Purple struggled considerably at the beginning. I have a distinct memory of playing my warlock with Emo in Un'goro, and whispering with Ary and Euph about how they had wiped on Attumen and now the trash had respawned. ATTUMEN. I told Emo this, and she expressed concern that it would be destabilizing for the whole guild if one KZ team was clearly "better" than the other, which was a difficulty I knew other guilds on the server were experiencing. People would get mad about not being in the "good" raid, and so forth.
It wasn't very long after this that something happened which hurt my feelings more than any of the other crap that happened later. Emo left me behind and leveled ahead of my warlock, not by saying "Hey, thanks for the help but I'm going to get my girlfriend to powerlevel me now", but by promising to do particular things with me and then doing them by herself or getting run through them after I had logged off. She did this repeatedly until I had to conclude that she no longer wanted to play with me, and also had low enough respect for me and my time that she would lie about her intentions.
My priest hit 70 on the 24th but I have no particular memory of it. I anticipated I would do the same thing with him that I had done at 60, namely use him as a healbot for easy instances when people wanted to play and there was no healer around.
May
This was when I started having problems with my position in the "good" raid, as Emo had an unpleasant habit of disregarding approvals and giving her girlfriend a spot in the raid over other people.
I do not think Ary was trying to poach me from the other raid, I think he just didn't have enough healers which was why he began begging me to play mine in his raid, which happened to be better organized than the "good" raid. He made it clear, though, that they already had 2 hunters and did not want any more.
This left me with an extremely hard choice: Either keep playing the toon I wanted in a raid where I was jerked around and disrespected by the raid leader, or change mains and move to a raid that was less progressed but more equitably run.
I sat on the fence and split time between the raids for a couple of weeks, which caused Emo to step up her inexplicable mistreatment of me, perhaps thinking she could get me to stay in her raid by being an unbearable fucktard. Didn't work. I changed mains and changed raids.
It was very hard, especially taking a step back in progression and having to learn fights like Moroes and Maiden over again.
I do not take credit for this (though Ary likes to give me credit for it), but shortly after I joined Purple started clicking and began to overtake Cerulean's progression. Aran was the first boss we killed before them, on the 24th.
June
I quit my dumb office job that I didn't like and got a retail job that I disliked a little less. This I guess is when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bowdlerized and idlerat came to visit, as I remember complaining about my future boss jerking me around and calling me back for far too many interviews.
The two raids killed Netherspite at basically the same time. I believe I was on both kills, since Cerulean needed an extra person somehow. Both raids killed Prince on the 11th. Purple killed Nightbane on the 18th, and Cerulean killed him some embarrassing number of weeks later.
Not that it was a competition, but we won.
Also during this time the Amber debacle happened, which was the totally unnecessary third KZ group Emo allowed someone else to start who shouldn't have been in charge of tying his shoes, let alone running a raid.
July
Book 7 came out and I spent all day Saturday reading it. It was pretty much exactly what I expected.
On the 13th we downed Maulgar, thus auspiciously beginning a solid four months of that guild being unable to even approach downing Gruul. Guess what? This did little to assuage the growing rift between the KZ raids, which now hated each other and resented playing together in a 25-man setting.
August
On the 3rd they announced the next expansion, causing everyone who plays and cares about progression to look around and ask themselves whether they were where they wanted or expected to be eight months post-BC. I wasn't.
Remember when Xadir quit and xferred to Cenarius and then got kicked out of his new guild and asked to come back? Those were good times.
The week before my birthday Euphoric came to visit me! On my birthday weekend_hannelore came to visit me too. My calendar leading up to this period says things like CLEAN THE FUCKING HOUSE!!!!! It was the greatest thing ever, and we saw the OotP movie.
September
On the 17th Ary texted me: I just put a post up to emo telling her my intentions [to leave and start my own guild].
September 22 is the official guild creation date.
We began with perhaps fifteen people. It was terrifying. Lap said to me, "I hope you don't get bored running KZ."
While we worked on our recruitment, I finished leveling my warlock, which I hadn't touched since the Emo falling out.
October
On the 19th we killed Maulgar and Gruul. Upon waking up the next morning, I found that life was full of puppies and rainbows, and also Dumbledore was gay. A happier moment in the year is difficult to locate.
November
13th - Magtheridon & Nalorakk
16th - Void Reaver
18th - Akil'zon
21st - The Lurker Below
26th - Halazzi
It was like we were a raiding guild or something. DoA killed Gruul on the 27th, which I found totally nonthreatening.
December
December basically sucked because they extended my hours, meaning that on many days I had to go to work for 10 hours, speed home, arrive late to the raid, raid for 4 hours while eating for dinner whatever I could prepare during our 3-minute bio breaks, park my toon at our next destination, go straight to sleep, get up and go to work.
Also, remember when I broke my tooth while on a marathon leveling session with Seyjan in February? Yeah, me neither. Except it turned out the tooth broke because it was completely decayed and needed to be removed, which cost me a lot of money. See the dentist twice a year, kids. And when pieces of your body are breaking and falling off, put the game DOWN.
On the 2nd we killed Hydross, on the 20th we killed Jan'alai. Our Leotheras attempts were like 3% wipes, we really could have killed him this month if so many people hadn't been on vacation. I guess we still have time to try.
[ETA: We killed him on the 28th.]
Plans for 2008... continue to progress as far as we can before it all starts over again. Then shed our epics for level 71 greens and break the dynamic spawn rate in Northrend.
Also I need a new planner! I love the one I have, and it is so sad that I must part with it. I can never find the exact same kind of planner the next year.
I was going to post a relevant screenshot for each month, but then that was too much work and I didn't have any cool ones, so here's something random.
"nice doggie"
The title of this post, by the way, derives from a guildmate attempting to reference the saying "capslock is cruise control for cool", and managing instead to say:
This cracked me up so much I had to screenshot it, and then while looking through my screenies couldn't figure out why I had taken a picture of us just standing around rebuffing.
I was looking through my old LJ entries seeing what sorts of things I had posted on past Christmases. Holy crap, I used to be funny. I mean predictions for 2005, that was gold. I'm sure I'm not that funny anymore.
I also found that I wrote a fandom year in review post for 2005, which I imply that everyone else was doing, but I don't remember it at all. I am now going to review 2007 for no reason. Well really, so that I can look back on it and remember all this shit next year.
January
Kicked off BC as a charter member of my old guild, which we formed because we no longer liked our old old guild, which we came to Proudmoore to join in August 2006 because we no longer liked our old old old guild. Yes, I've been playing with basically the same core group of 10-15 people since 2005.
I either didn't take any screenshots on release day, or have since deleted them. The crowd in HFP was mind-blowing. And framerate-blowing. There were so many people it broke the dynamic spawn rate, causing the mobs outside Thrallmar to respawn as soon as they were engaged. I remember trying to do the fel orc quest in a group of 5 and barely surviving, and then the fel reaver comes tromping through and everyone runs for cover, training dozens of mobs behind them.
Then Vandy led us to Shattrath, where I promptly got lost, and then FAILED the intro quest because I saw something shiny and lost sight of the guardian NPC.
Then we rode into Nagrand to get the flight point, and the whole zone was completely deserted. The Murkblood riders ganked me. Then Vandy was showing us Halaa, which I guess we were the first to capture since it started out neutral when we arrived. (Zomg server first.)
I think the first person to 70 in our guild was Odo, on January 25 (so eight days after release). It was a close race, but Vandy and Vio fell behind by a couple of days for some real life reason that I don't remember.
January 25 is the first date WarcraftRealms shows Arymere guilded to DoA. It seemed like it had been longer since he left the game due to having the shit kicked out of him on the forums of our old guild.
February
I was not racing, so my hunter got to 70 on or about February 6. I don't have a screenshot or even remember exactly what I was doing, but I was in Blade's Edge with Seyjan. We did most of the late 60s together, hunter/shaman. It was fast and fun. Pets should come with their own Earth Shield.
During one of these sessions I was eating dinner and one of my wisdom teeth broke for no evident reason. I said to Seyjan, "I just broke a tooth." He said, "Are you okay?" I said, "Yeah, it doesn't hurt, let's keep going." (See also: December.)
I feel like a lot of people quickly forgot the drama that happened in mid-late February and into March, when it became clear that some people would not only level slowly, but also complain heavily about the fact that we hadn't waited for them and were not dropping everything to run them through Mana-Tombs. I couldn't understand this. If you wanted to be in the first wave of people going into KZ, that was REALLY up to you to take care of, and not up to others to drag you along.
It wasn't something that could be glossed over, it was horrible. People left over it. Remember when Vandy gquit and joined Detox, only to have Detox collapse, at which point he left the game for a while? Remember Odo inviting his three friends from somewhere else and then refusing to group or do anything without them? One night I was trying to suggest we should mix up the groups so we'd have the composition to run two simultaneous BM groups and get more people their attunement, to which he replied, "Well, MY friends and I are already attuned" which caused me to want to kill him IRL. Then they all rerolled on some low pop server somewhere and it was all my fault I think because I was so mean to him?
In retrospect it is hard to appreciate what we were getting worked up over, but this was a point where we had no gear, and BM was hard. I mean it was so hard it merited lengthy strategy threads on the guild forums. And every time a BM group failed, those were people whose mains weren't attuned, and another day we as a guild could not run KZ.
I distinctly remember Seyjan being like, "When everyone gets to 70 and is attuned we'll forget this stuff happened." Which turned out to be true, but not beneficial, because it was the same problem that would continue dogging the guild until the progression-oriented people left. (An oversimplification of what happened, but accurate enough.)
March
March 3 was our first KZ run. I guess we were about the third Proudmoore Horde guild into KZ, which is a pretty sad statement for the server really. We killed Attumen. Then I don't know, we cleared up to Moroes and wiped pitifully. I think we went to the basement, and someone asked why we were doing this, to which Emo said, and I am not making this up, "Because we are IN KARAZHAN."
We killed Moroes on the 11th. To accomplish this I respecced my hunter deep Survival so I could stand in one place and chain trap Rafe motherfucking Draugr without ever moving or risking him coming up. When your entire raid are in greens and blues, Moroes is hard. I am just saying.
We killed Maiden on the 26th. I don't really remember anything about the learning process, because there isn't anything to do or know unless you're a healer or a tank.
Also this month Emo (really Sheelba at the time) decided to reroll paladin because she missed her Alliance paladin that she was always bragging about. At this time she and I were friends, so I made a warlock to keep her company.
I also decided to start leveling my 60 priest for no real reason.
April
We beat Oz on the 2nd, Curator/Chess on the 16th, and Illhoof on the 30th. By "we" I mean the team now called Cerulean, to distinguish it from Team Purple which had its first KZ raid on the 6th.
Team Purple struggled considerably at the beginning. I have a distinct memory of playing my warlock with Emo in Un'goro, and whispering with Ary and Euph about how they had wiped on Attumen and now the trash had respawned. ATTUMEN. I told Emo this, and she expressed concern that it would be destabilizing for the whole guild if one KZ team was clearly "better" than the other, which was a difficulty I knew other guilds on the server were experiencing. People would get mad about not being in the "good" raid, and so forth.
It wasn't very long after this that something happened which hurt my feelings more than any of the other crap that happened later. Emo left me behind and leveled ahead of my warlock, not by saying "Hey, thanks for the help but I'm going to get my girlfriend to powerlevel me now", but by promising to do particular things with me and then doing them by herself or getting run through them after I had logged off. She did this repeatedly until I had to conclude that she no longer wanted to play with me, and also had low enough respect for me and my time that she would lie about her intentions.
My priest hit 70 on the 24th but I have no particular memory of it. I anticipated I would do the same thing with him that I had done at 60, namely use him as a healbot for easy instances when people wanted to play and there was no healer around.
May
This was when I started having problems with my position in the "good" raid, as Emo had an unpleasant habit of disregarding approvals and giving her girlfriend a spot in the raid over other people.
I do not think Ary was trying to poach me from the other raid, I think he just didn't have enough healers which was why he began begging me to play mine in his raid, which happened to be better organized than the "good" raid. He made it clear, though, that they already had 2 hunters and did not want any more.
This left me with an extremely hard choice: Either keep playing the toon I wanted in a raid where I was jerked around and disrespected by the raid leader, or change mains and move to a raid that was less progressed but more equitably run.
I sat on the fence and split time between the raids for a couple of weeks, which caused Emo to step up her inexplicable mistreatment of me, perhaps thinking she could get me to stay in her raid by being an unbearable fucktard. Didn't work. I changed mains and changed raids.
It was very hard, especially taking a step back in progression and having to learn fights like Moroes and Maiden over again.
I do not take credit for this (though Ary likes to give me credit for it), but shortly after I joined Purple started clicking and began to overtake Cerulean's progression. Aran was the first boss we killed before them, on the 24th.
June
I quit my dumb office job that I didn't like and got a retail job that I disliked a little less. This I guess is when
bowdlerized and idlerat came to visit, as I remember complaining about my future boss jerking me around and calling me back for far too many interviews.The two raids killed Netherspite at basically the same time. I believe I was on both kills, since Cerulean needed an extra person somehow. Both raids killed Prince on the 11th. Purple killed Nightbane on the 18th, and Cerulean killed him some embarrassing number of weeks later.
Not that it was a competition, but we won.
Also during this time the Amber debacle happened, which was the totally unnecessary third KZ group Emo allowed someone else to start who shouldn't have been in charge of tying his shoes, let alone running a raid.
July
Book 7 came out and I spent all day Saturday reading it. It was pretty much exactly what I expected.
On the 13th we downed Maulgar, thus auspiciously beginning a solid four months of that guild being unable to even approach downing Gruul. Guess what? This did little to assuage the growing rift between the KZ raids, which now hated each other and resented playing together in a 25-man setting.
August
On the 3rd they announced the next expansion, causing everyone who plays and cares about progression to look around and ask themselves whether they were where they wanted or expected to be eight months post-BC. I wasn't.
Remember when Xadir quit and xferred to Cenarius and then got kicked out of his new guild and asked to come back? Those were good times.
The week before my birthday Euphoric came to visit me! On my birthday weekend
_hannelore came to visit me too. My calendar leading up to this period says things like CLEAN THE FUCKING HOUSE!!!!! It was the greatest thing ever, and we saw the OotP movie.September
On the 17th Ary texted me: I just put a post up to emo telling her my intentions [to leave and start my own guild].
September 22 is the official guild creation date.
We began with perhaps fifteen people. It was terrifying. Lap said to me, "I hope you don't get bored running KZ."
While we worked on our recruitment, I finished leveling my warlock, which I hadn't touched since the Emo falling out.
October
On the 19th we killed Maulgar and Gruul. Upon waking up the next morning, I found that life was full of puppies and rainbows, and also Dumbledore was gay. A happier moment in the year is difficult to locate.
November
13th - Magtheridon & Nalorakk
16th - Void Reaver
18th - Akil'zon
21st - The Lurker Below
26th - Halazzi
It was like we were a raiding guild or something. DoA killed Gruul on the 27th, which I found totally nonthreatening.
December
December basically sucked because they extended my hours, meaning that on many days I had to go to work for 10 hours, speed home, arrive late to the raid, raid for 4 hours while eating for dinner whatever I could prepare during our 3-minute bio breaks, park my toon at our next destination, go straight to sleep, get up and go to work.
Also, remember when I broke my tooth while on a marathon leveling session with Seyjan in February? Yeah, me neither. Except it turned out the tooth broke because it was completely decayed and needed to be removed, which cost me a lot of money. See the dentist twice a year, kids. And when pieces of your body are breaking and falling off, put the game DOWN.
On the 2nd we killed Hydross, on the 20th we killed Jan'alai. Our Leotheras attempts were like 3% wipes, we really could have killed him this month if so many people hadn't been on vacation. I guess we still have time to try.
[ETA: We killed him on the 28th.]
Plans for 2008... continue to progress as far as we can before it all starts over again. Then shed our epics for level 71 greens and break the dynamic spawn rate in Northrend.
Also I need a new planner! I love the one I have, and it is so sad that I must part with it. I can never find the exact same kind of planner the next year.
I was going to post a relevant screenshot for each month, but then that was too much work and I didn't have any cool ones, so here's something random.
"nice doggie"
The title of this post, by the way, derives from a guildmate attempting to reference the saying "capslock is cruise control for cool", and managing instead to say:
This cracked me up so much I had to screenshot it, and then while looking through my screenies couldn't figure out why I had taken a picture of us just standing around rebuffing.
