Day 6 – My workplace

Last Updated on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 08:48 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 13 March 2012 08:48

oday’s topic is a bit of a weird one, but I guess there might be bloggers out there with incredibly cool workplaces. You’re in for a disappointment, my workplace is pretty boring. Without further ado, my desk!

Told you so, nothing to write home about! I work as a web admin and mostly tweak and fix many many WordPress blogs, test plugins, or set up new blogs. As I have a lot of downtime, I try to educate myself with more CSS knowledge, and try to read up on HTML 5 and CSS 3. My beverages of choice as witnessed on the right are instant chocolate cappucino and Apfelschorle, which is apple juice mixed with mineral water. I also like to read on my Kindle at work, so that’s there, plus my fairly ghetto cell phone. I also have a big ass candle next to my monitor, and I haven’t got the slightest clue where it comes from. I never put it there. It’s rather puzzling. Oh, and of course there’s my Sennheiser ear buds, because I wouldn’t be able to survive at work without music. My highlight of the day was that Spotify came to Germany, which makes me go squee, seriously.

My 6 months trial period in the company is over in April, and once that’s done with, I will bring a photo of my wife and the kitties, and something nerdy as well. What do you think I should have there? Give me ideas for nerdy desk decorations, folks. My old Coke truck won’t work anymore, now that I broke the soda habit (for the most part).

In order to make this post more exciting, my co-worker Marion downloaded an Android app and took another picture of my desk, this time with chubby me actually at work there. Yes, we can!

Day 5 – My favorite item in an MMO

Last Updated on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 03:21 Written by Kadomi Monday, 12 March 2012 07:06

eah, I know this is a couple days late, and I can tell you what’s to blame. Mass Effect 3. I am as always a slave to Bioware games, and I can’t quite believe I am taking time away from my preciousssss right now to blog. Now more than ever I would like to tell everyone in the world that even if you do not enjoy shooters at all, you should give it a try. Get Mass Effect 1, bear with it, don’t give up if you get stuck in a corner in the damn Mako once again. If you hate the Mako, stick with the main missions and enjoy. Play Mass Effect 2 as well, and then get the conclusion. I don’t care that the last 3% suck, if it’s made me love three games that much. It’s a fantastic story.

Buuuuut, back to the main subject. My favorite item. Again, this will be based on WoW as I never played another MMO to such a degree that I would have a favorite item. Now, I have to be open with you. I am not a collector. I am…maybe not the average WoW player. Maybe something’s wrong with me, but I seem to be missing a switch. In my American guild, I was pretty much the only girl who did not a) collect pets, b) collect mounts, or c) collect achievement points. That’s not to say I didn’t do achievements. I did the ones that I thought were neat. I racked up a total of 6520 points, which is nothing to write home about, but still, I did some. I am a sucker for reputation grinds, so I got the Exalted, for example. Still, not a collector, so a whole part of the game seems to zoom past me. I quit my US account before 4.3 dropped, and so I never partook in the craziness of transmogging. I marvel at blogs like Go Mog Yourself. It looks fun, no? I don’t think I could be crazy enough to collect transmog gear for the perfect outfit. I always liked gear upgrades and displaying them, and I have a long history of never turning helmets off. Until Cataclysm. The blue tanking helmets were unbelievably fug, so I turned them off for the first time in my 5 years of playing her.

And yet, I was a bit of a packrat on Kadomi. Every expansion I carefully selected which items would stay, and which would go. I had an amazing collection of shoulders. What defines an orc warrior more than shoulders? I don’t know. Same with shields. Same with very very select tanking weapons. If I were still to play Kadomi, I know she would only be using one particular weapon, my favorite item in the game:

I come from a time when epics were nearly impossible to achieve for the casual player. You had your dungeon set in vanilla, plus very rare world drops, and for everything else you needed to raid. I did some VERY light raiding in 20s, two bosses in Zul’Gurub and four bosses in AQ20, and never scored any loot, so I did not have any epics before. Then came The Burning Crusade. The final bosses of heroic dungeons dropped one epic. Heroic dungeons were hard, and so often, especially if you had no gear from Karazhan, you didn’t actually make it to the final boss. There were a few heroics that were easier than others. Slave Pens. The Botanica. And the place that became my daily home, The Mechanar. You see, the Mechanar was special. The final boss, Pathaleon the Calculator dropped three epics, plus one more epic with a brutally low drop rate. It was around 4% back in the day. The Sun Eater.

It was special. It was a tanking epic. It had an epic name, and flavor text. It had a model like none I had ever seen before and to this day there is no other sword using this particular model. It looked like grabbed right from the heart of a dying sun, indeed. I wanted it. The Mechanar was one of the more popular heroics, because it was a relatively short instance, with a good badge to effort ratio. It had two gatekeeper mini-bosses that also dropped Badges of Justice in the beginning. That was later removed, but as it was so easy to get to them, people farmed those two easy badges. Then you had the impossible middle-boss, Nethermancer Sepethrea that was usually skipped because she was really difficult. I mean, I have been there dozens of time, but we killed her maybe three times tops. From her room you had a gauntlet event that was fairly harrowing, especially as warrior. Thunderclap did jackall in the day, and you had to be really fast about picking up stray mobs or your healer was toast. Pathaleon the Calculator himself was almost a breeze in comparison, he was not very difficult at all.

I have such clear memories of this instance. I can still hear his voice in my head. ‘We are on a strict timetable! You will not interfere!’ The Sun Eater was Kadomi’s first real epic, and I felt I had earned it, the hard way. In those early heroic runs when my gear was still crap, and my skills were fairly limited, I learned to use all of the warrior skillset. How to apply sunders to multiple mobs, line of sight tanking, quick reflexes when mobs ran off to the healer (and healer aggro was a big deal), everything. All in all it took me about 20 runs of the instance to get that drop, but that made it all the more special. I screamed so loudly that the cats hid under the bed in fear. I spent a fortune on getting a Mongoose enchant on it. It was hard to find an enchanter for it, as the enchant itself was a raid drop. For me, The Sun Eater is the symbol of a time when the game was vibrant and fresh, the difficulty was challenging and rewarding, and you had active goals to work on. That such difficulty and hard work ethic is now reserved for hardmode raids, and that the game itself has moved on from those days makes me sad, but probably also a bit of a curmudgeon. People don’t want this kind of gameplay nowadays, and I have to respect that.

But damn, I wish there were more Sun Eaters in the world. Something to strive for, to work for, and then to gloriously wrest it out of the hands of the RNG boss, even when you’re not a raider. Something that’s cool and has a great look and just makes you feel badass.

Any other special items out there? I’d love to hear your stories.

Day 4 – My best MMO memory

Last Updated on Tuesday, 6 March 2012 02:14 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 6 March 2012 03:00

his is going to be another WoW-centric post, because when you play WoW like I did, as single game focus for 5+ years, you will inevitably end up with the best memories in that game. I am still in the process of forging new best memories in other games.

It’s very difficult to pinpoint any one particular occurrence as the best memory. I have several favorites, and I can’t pick which ones the best. So in my usual rambling style, I’ll share my top 3 moments.

The first highlight of my WoW life was in 2006, when my SO and I completed the dreadsteed quest chain for warlocks. In vanilla, my SO and I played warlocks. Quatsch and Tratsch. That’s German and liberally translates to Bullshit/Rubbish and Gossip. It’s what you do over here for your afternoon coffee. I was Tratsch, the gossipy one. The two of us had joined Daughters of the Horde in April 2006, after drifting around aimlessly for a while. Up to that point I have never been in a guild that I could call home. I was either in trade chat guilds that randomly picked me up, and then in late 2005 when I opened my US account I joined a guild of US friends who a few months in decided they’d rather PvP and unceremoniously switched servers. We didn’t want to PvP, so there we were, drifting aimlessly around. Until we found DotH, the guild that was my home from 2006 until October 2011.

The epic warlock mount quest was a chain where we had the full support of our guildies at all steps of it. It required a lot of farming and gold, and trust me, in vanilla you didn’t have as much gold as people are touting about today. Guildies farmed the black dragonscales and dark iron ore for us and helped us with the arcanite. I spent a million years it felt like, to farm the ghost mushrooms in the Hinterlands, to make enough Elixir of Shadow Power for us. Guildies took us to the alchemy lab in Scholomance as part of our weekly dungeon group. Yup, we only had time to run dungeons once a week, but when we did it, it kicked ass. Our warlock friend Tryna and two other guildies then took us to Dire Maul West. Tryna already had the expensive items that you needed to summon your future mount, and if you knew someone who had them, they could come along and help. Which is what she did. It was an epic event in Dire Maul West, and a fantastic quest chain, and it was the first huge accomplishment we achieved in WoW, back before acheesement points and all that jazz. I remember posing around for screenshots for hours later. So, thanks Tryna, Nagna and Zade, for providing one of the best MMO memories of mine. Great times.

Other favorite memories mostly revolve around raiding achievements with DotH. I was raid leader from 2007 til May 2011. In 2008 I decided I really really wanted to receive the Champion of the Naaru title, even though I didn’t raid 25-mans. I remember the shaking hands and racing heart after the 45 minute run of heroic Shattered Halls. Seriously, as prot warrior that instance was HARD. But we made it, and completed the other steps of the quest chain as well. In a joint effort of the Straw Hat Pirates and DotH we killed Gruul and Magtheridon, and I got my shiny title. That was pretty awesome. It is to this day my favorite title. Our guild friendship unfortunately fell apart in WotLK when a bunch of former DotH members joined their guild. Still, I salute the Straw Hat Pirates in any case, I really appreciated their help.

In WotLK we managed to clear all normal 10-man content before Cataclysm dropped, and a couple of Ulduar and ICC hardmodes. Yogg-Saron and The Lich King were major stumbling stones for us, we spent a long time on both bosses, multiple weeks, and finally getting them was fantastic. Especially in Ulduar, I had so much fun, the bosses in there were quite excellent, a quality I felt was never achieved again in other raids. Yogg-Saron’s firstkill is a bittersweet memory, because that’s when my SO decided she was done with WoW. It was the last raid we ever had together.

All my greatest memories are connected to Daughters of the Horde, and the fantastic girls in that guild. I am still friends with a few of them, but not as many as I would like, which is a shame. They have shaped the way I am looking at MMOs and guilds today. I am not sure I will ever find another guild that will be so much a home as they were. But I will keep on trying.