Mystic Chicanery

Cataclysm Beta Opt-in (the real one, not the one that just phishes your account info from you) is now available.

https://www.battle.net/account/management/beta-profile.xml

If your account has an authenticator you will need to have that when you attempt to opt-in.

Really I expected the Alpha to last longer.

Currently prognosticating October for release. I’ll be (happily) surprised if it comes earlier.

Things the bug me about RealID.

What if I don’t what to associate my “real” name with my online handle? What if it’s socially unacceptable for me in my RL to be a “gamer” and being “found out” would be bad?

I don’t know my “friends” by their “real” name.. I know them by a handle. Seriously. I don’t call him John Cabrerra, I call him Ryz. It’s NOT less confusing to group all his toons together by his real name. Now, if they allow me to setup the alias I use for his name.. then it will be nice.

What if I want to be invisible? I just don’t feel like “playing with my friends” so I log onto my “secret toon” on my “secret” server just to mess around. With this system my “friends” know all my toons and can see me no matter where I’m logged in.

I just.. I don’t love it.. and I’m not sure I like the direction it’s going.

Idle wondering for today.
When thinking about the battle.net integration we keep talking about WoW and SCII because those are the only ones of Blizzards games that we can see being integrated. Privately I’ve talked with a few people about how useful it will be since it only accounts for those two games.. I mean it doesn’t tell me who’s off playing on the XBOX. That said.. Blizzard is owned by Activision.. and Activision makes Call of Duty II.. and Call of Duty II is integrated with XBox live. What if battle.net is the first step to integrating WoW and SCII into the XBOX Live and the Playstation equivalent..

That might be kind of cool.

Last night we had a great night raiding. It was 10-man ICC. We downed the lower spire and festergut/rotface in the first 90 minutes of the raid. Then we went on to down Putricide (oneshot) and Blood Princes (4-shot). Finally we downed Valithria (two shot). It was the first time I had EVER attempted Valithria. So.. good night raiding.

After the raid I decided to do some spring cleaning. It’s that time again.

Now, today (or at least this week) open up your bank/vault and look hard at what’s in there. Do you still have enchanting mats from Outland? A Fel Blossom or two? Now pop open your currency tab. Check out all those stones keeper shards.

It’s time for spring cleaning. Cataclysm is coming. Do you honestly want to be lugging all that crap around for another 5 levels? Sell it NOW before it’s all worthless (or at least before everyone else floods the market).
Continue reading Spring Cleaning

• Blizz Store continues to hate me. My order for Star Pony -still- won’t go through. This makes me sad. I may actually have to call and talk to a human being to complete my order. Yeah.. because sitting on hold to get them to take my money was on the TOP of my list of things to do.
• I was Raid Lead for our 10-man this week. Mostly it was alts and don’t-play-very-often mains. I felt all fuzzy and disconnected. I haven’t lead a raid in MONTHS. I think I need to un-rustify myself.
• Roose texted me and asked if I’d noticed a DPS drop. Roose is another warlock on our server. I know him outside the game. He said that after Tuesday’s deploy he noticed a drop in DPS and asked if I’d noticed the same. I had, sort of, but since I was raid leading I didn’t pay much attention to it (Raid leading was distracting me from optimizing my rotations). Also, since it was and alt-ish run.. even though I think I was personally down in DPS I still came in at a top DPS position. Any other warlocks notice a drop?
• Another, more advanced guild decided to join <Caffeine>. A lot of things when into their decision.. and in fact they had to do a server transfer to join.. I think we got 18 new accounts. This doubles the size of Caffeine and suddenly puts 25-mans into reach. It also will inevitably lead to some growing pains.
• We need to adjust our policies to account for the increased number of people.. and we also need to work diligently to integrate the new people. I don’t want to end up with Us and Them. We are Caffeine. They will be assimilated. We will add their distinctiveness to our own.
• The in-game interface for adding/adjusting guild ranks SUCKS. I need to add some intermediate ranks and I’m dreading the task.
• Stop from Stoppable Force (who’s a tank in Caffeine) mentioned that in Cataclysm, in addition to limiting us to one raid size per lockout.. they’re also talking about letting you change from a 10- to 25-man on a boss by boss basis (blue link). This is super hot. I’m totally in favor of that. Granted.. if you go from 25 to 10.. then 15 people get gyped out of the seeing the last of the dungeon.. but hey.. if they were really worried about that they would have showed up for the second night of raiding.
• If you haven’t read this you really should (yes, I made the title on purpose.. and yes, everytime I see Alot I giggle inside).