One shot: Ixobelle

MMO community connection:

Ixobelle.com

How does it feel to break a grown man’s heart?

Ixo: Let’s get everyone else up to speed here for a sec.

Randolph contacted me back in early April to participate in his interview project, and I totally spaced it. I apparently received an email, opened it, then never replied. I can only imagine that I opened the email bleary eyed at 4 in the morning after a cheap beer infused PUG raid from hell that stretched out way too long. I do those a bit too often, and make the mistake of checking my email as the last thing I do before shutting down the system to fall asleep on the floor. Literally. People think Futons are quaint, because they have beds for when they actually go to sleep. Sleeping on a Futon every night here in Japan has been horrible. Waking up in the morning, god forbid you have a hangover, is like clawing your way up to the surface of earth from the depths of hell every morning. It certainly isn’t “stepping out of bed”.

Anyway. Sidetrack. The point is that I apparently got an email, and totally spaced it. Then I’d read interviews with Hatch (where he *specifically* mentions me in his interview), or Tobold, or Spinks, whatever… and then wistfully look out my window at the moon, think ONE DAY THAT’LL BE ME, and then cry myself to sleep.

I’m an idiot. This isn’t news.

So along comes Randolph, AGAIN, offering me a second chance at redemption. He went so far as to say he hoped he wasn’t bothering me, and he’d understand if I *STILL* didn’t want to do it. I was about to call shenanigans on him, and send him a screen shot of my EMPTY gmail search results for “Randolph” when there it was… April 3rd.

OOPS.

You silly man, you had me at “Hello again”! We wept in each others arms for a few emails, then it just got weird, then it was cool again, and now here we are.

ANYWAY! I figure I owe him *two* interviews, and will thusly be answering all questions as me, Ixobelle, and also as Batman. Let’s get this rolling.

Batman: I’M BATMAN!

Please take a minute and describe what your blog is about.

Ixo: My title graphic says “Rants about MMOs, Living in Japan, Gaming in General, Whatever…”

I tend to focus on WoW, because it’s what I play and know best. I love trying out new MMOs, though, and will often write reviews of their basic mechanics as a service for my readers. Thankfully, I don’t need to be some putz at Gamespot and have a paragraph on graphics, one on sound, one on gameplay, etc. I really like the freedom I have, and the fact that I can tell everyone a game is a steaming pile of shit if I feel so inclined. Generally, people reading my stuff have a pretty good idea of my attitude toward things, so I don’t really need to sugar coat anything. Lots of people love to wave that flag, but then at the end, I think they secretly hope to be taken seriously at the end of the day. I was thrown out of the Warhammer beta for requesting that the source code be printed out, soaked in gasoline, stomped with cleats, and thrown off the White Cliffs of Dover in a functioning blender. People still respect Paul Barnett these days. All his little pre-release podcasts were full of bullshit, and he basically lied about 90% of the crap in them. I don’t care if Paul Barnett is my pal or not, though, at the end of the day. That said, when Warhammer released, it was in a much better state than it had been (but still wasn’t worth more than the one free month of my time). I have no problems with going back and eating my words in cases like that. That, to me, is what blogging is all about. Opinions change, and that’s okay. When a site gives Darklol a 2/10 though, everyone cries for baby Jesus, and people get fired when they say Kane and Lynch sucked. I really don’t think I’d be up for that kind of crap in exchange for a paycheck.

I also post silly crap about living in Japan, which people can’t get enough of. I swear Japan is just America, but I can’t read the magazines, and we eat with chopsticks. Japan is just as goo goo ga ga for America as America is for Japan. They should seriously just get a room.

I tacked the “whatever” on the end so when I write about some random topic, so one can call me on it.

Batman: WIFF! POW! ZANG! KABLAMMO!

What was your introduction to MMOs and what was that experience like?

The first MMO I ever played was Final Fantasy 11. Every time you logged in, there was a little dialog box that said “Please don’t forget about your friends, family, and other obligations” or something like that. I thought it was hilarious. At the time I was living in a house in Oakland, CA, with 9 other people (it was a huge house, rent was a disaster), and they used to joke about it to me every time I logged in (my computer was in the main ‘family room’). Then it became less and less funny, and eventually ended in violence. Not really. But it started to make sense, and I didn’t even really *LIKE* FF11. I hated it, actually. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the hell a Link Shell was, I had nobody else I played with, and god it was so boring. People just AFKed their little toons in town with their “shop” open, and it was just so… dumb. Plus everyone looked the same. I ran my level 6 out to the middle of a desert somewhere, dying over and over, just to SEE something in the game. The higher level toons out there were shocked to see lil Isobel out in the middle of a high level zone, and they helped walk me back to town. I don’t think they “got” what I was doing. I logged out.

The next part kind of ties into the next question…

Batman: 2 liters of grapefruit juice… three raw eggs… two shortstacks of flapjacks, five strips of bacon, and some plain toast. No butter. Also, please don’t cut my toast on the diagonal, leave it all in one piece. White bread. Yes. Hot. No, no, no… no sugar, no cream. Just black. Yes. No. Not decaf. Regular. Thanks. Over easy. Yeah. Ok. Sure. Thanks.

Can you recall that first MMO “wow!” moment?

(continued from previous question) Along came the WoW beta, and a friend of one of my roommates worked at Blizz and got us in. ZOMG. Like night and day. It was fucking incredible. I really had just never played anything like it. Final Fantasy was awful, and I’m not sure why I played it. WoW took no justification. We wanted to play, all the time. The bugs were there, and the client went through some serious changes, but that was almost part of the appeal. It was a living piece of software. We knew right away this game was going to be huge, and here we were playing it, while the rest of the world waited eagerly to sink their teeth in. Especially having a good friend, in a LAN environment, was huge. We could learn the game together. I rolled an undead female warlock, and named it Isobel, and my career in World of Warcraft was chiseled in stone. To this day, every toon I roll is an undead girl with the same face and skin tone. I made one slight change to the hair style (from neatly combed to the “blowback” style) at one point, but it’s been some variation on Isobel from the closed beta this whole time.

At the very beginning, we were both in his room set up side to side, but eventually I moved my box into my own room, and we clunked around with various voice apps. Ventrilo was still pretty rudimentary, Teamspeak sucked (and still does, lol), and using something like Yahoo messenger was laggy since the packets went out to the internet, and then right back in to the same house. Eventually we used some built in Microsoft Netmeeting collaboration thing that was a part of windows, but was old school legacy and wasn’t even documented. We typed CONF into a command line to get it running. It was kooky, but worked. Our roommates gave us hell for being in separate rooms but talking over microphones to each other. We didn’t care. They were console gamers, and didn’t understand.

Batman: ROBIN! TO THE BATMOBILE! THE JOKER IS UP TO SOME HIJINX AGAIN! WHAT DO YOU MEAN HAVE I EVER HEARD OF KNOC– WHAT THE HELL, PUT SOME PANTS ON MAN! JESUS WHAT IS THAT MAN DOING? GOAT WHAT? UGH! I THINK I’M GOING TO BE BAT SICK!

At your peak, how much time per week would you say you spent playing? How about now?

At my peak let’s just say I played WAY TOO MUCH. My main account from retail launch to the end of burning crusade got banned for botting fishing (don’t ask), but that’s probably a blessing in disguise, because if I “/play”ed that account I’d probably need to kill myself when I saw the result. I had 3 full end game 70 “mains” (alts are for noobs), and spent ridiculous amounts of time just doing nothing, but logged in.

Now I have a 10 month old son, and a wife who doesn’t ‘get’ gaming in general. She’ll play Wii tennis or Mario Galaxy with me, but she’ll never touch an MMO. They don’t gross her out or anything silly, but it’s just not her style. She likes stuff like Jewel Quest, tile matching stuff. I think she’d really like the Mining minigame from Free Realms. She’s supportive that I want to get into that line of work, and can see I’m passionate about gaming and my blog, but she’s happy to play Facebook or work on her own blog(s). Japan is blogging nuts, and she has one about the kid, and one about food. She’s proficient on a computer, which is a plus.

After she and the kid hit the sack for the day (10ish), I jump online for a few hours a night, pretty regularly. Some nights I watch a movie instead, or just surf around my long list of blog bookmarks, but I get my time in on my new account. I currently have four 80s, but only two are really geared. The others will happily farm heroics for tier gear after 3.2 hits, much to everyone else’s dismay. I don’t really give a shit. I know I’m a good player, I don’t have any issue with WHERE my gear comes from.

Batman: Look, lady. Just put the fucking poodle DOWN and let’s talk about this like two normal, civilized human beings. I SAID PUT IT FUCKING DOWN. ONE STEP CLOSER AND I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD, BITCH– BATARANG TO THE FUCKING TITS. DO YOU HEAR ME?! AM I GETTING THROUGH HERE?!

Do you tend to supplement your MMO gaming with other PC, console, or tabletop games?

I currently enjoy losing over and over to online matches of Street Fighter 4 on the PS3. I love playing Chun-Li or Sakura. There’s just something so satisfying about kicking someone’s ass with a girl toon, but more often than not, I just lose, and then out comes Ken.

I’d love to play tabletop games but there’s just no other warm bodies around for it. My same roommate from before and I got hooked on Yugioh for a while after accidentally renting the Yugioh game on the xbox (wrong disk in the box). We tried it, and started to get a handle on the mechanics, then just said fuck it and went down to the card shop and bought a couple boxes of cards each. Here were two twenty-somethings walking in and throwing down benjamins on the counter and being like, yeah, gimme a box of that one and another of that one. The 9 year olds all stopped playing, slackjawed, and begged us to help open our booster packs. We got back home, Jacob built up a vampire deck around a Vamipre Lord, and I got some chaos deck built up around the (now banned) Black Luster Soldier. That card was just too good, and if I could get it out (not hard to do) it was ridiculous. I read pojo.com‘s Card of the Day every day, and really dug into the meta game for Yugioh. It was nuts. People think Yugioh is a kids game, but there’s a really intricate game there once you start to actually learn it. YOU’VE ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD LOLOLOL, yeah… I get it. What you aren’t seeing is that you can stack counter traps and spells and equipment cards, and all kinds of crap that all come into a single play. Rarely is a trap card just ‘activated’ and nothing happens in return. We’d even watch the cartoon and lol at how WRONG the characters play the game in the cartoon. In the end, I probably ended up spending like 600 dollars on booster packs alone over the course of my Yugioh spree. This was actually right before I came to Japan, and when I got here, I crapped myself when I realized they were like two sets ahead of America. I started buying Japanese cards, but couldn’t read them, and would go online for translations of the card effects. But I had no one to play with! I taught elementary school and would bring decks to school to blow the minds of my students, then one little fucker stole my best deck (probably worth around 150$) and it kind of left a sour taste in my mouth.

I’d love to get into Magic or back into Yugioh, but it just requires having someone else to bounce decks off and actually sit down to play with.

Batman: We like WoW and we don’t care who knows, from R.F.C. straight to Maly-gos! We like WoW and we don’t care who knows… Shield Slam, Sunder, Shockwave, Taunt!

When did you first start blogging? Would you mind taking us up to present with all of your projects?

I started writing at NotAddicted.com, a tongue in cheek MMO site that parodied a lot of serious MMO crap of the time. They had articles like “Ask the Barrens” or just funny stories about people camping the Scarlet Crusade NPCs at Light’s Hope Chapel, and subsequently being reported for griefing. As I do with almost any ‘new’ site I find and enjoy, I tore through their entire archive, and loved all of it. New content wasn’t being produced fast enough, so I tentatively sent a PM to one of the writers (Runned) asking how would he feel if I wrote some stuff too? He asked me to produce three articles as a test, and he liked what I cranked out.

The first article I ever published for NotAddicted was back on Oct 19, 2006. It was a preview of the Burning Crusade, and basically amounted to me saying end game vanilla WoW was pointless, and to start leveling any toons you wanted as alts, because come the expansion, all that tier gear was totally obsolete. After a warm response to my initial submissions, I kept on going. My day was supposed to be Wednesday, but many of the other writers would slip on their days, so if I didn’t see anything new up for the day I’d just push my submission out early, and work on another one for my own day. I don’t begrudge any of the people there, and will always remember it’s where I first started, but eventually the other writers just drifted off the site, and I was left as the only one posting anything at all.

The site went thru some HUGE overhaul, that in the end only accomplished in about 6 months of being offline, and having everyone delete their bookmarks and stop checking back. It really killed our readership, and when we finally DID come back online, it was a merge with RedGuides, who I had never even heard of until that first day back up. RedGuides was apparently some exploit site (think: MMOwned), and had a pretty intense following. MMOwned, in fact, apparently just ripped off RedGuides for a lot of their initial content, but had a prettier, faster site, and so a lot of the people from RedGuides just went there eventually. Plus the RG crowd and NA crowd didn’t mesh very well, and everyone seemed pissed off that they were sharing their site with a bunch of strangers. In the end, I finally just decided I wasn’t really interested in continuing to write for someone else’s site alone, so I started up a blogger account, and migrated all my old stories over to that archive, and began anew on Oct 20, 2008 (almost 2 years later, to the day!).

My one other “project” is my online resume thing where I’ve designed a raid dungeon from scratch. I initially had a pretty inherent HEY BLIZZ theme to the site, but have gone through it and made some edits to replace “Blizzard” with “MMO company”. I want to get a job in the industry, but it doesn’t really have to be Blizzard in particular (although it would still be my first choice).

Batman: …and then she just looked at me, opened the batdoor, and got up out of the batmobile. I was so ashamed, Alfred! It doesn’t always happen, but it happens enough that I think it may be a real problem! Oh, Alfred! What should I do?! I mean, I’m either BATMAN, or I’m millionaire playboy BRUCE WAYNE! I can’t just go to come clinic…! What would the press say?! Anyway…. yeah, the batmobile needs a cleaning, you should probably get on that sooner rather than later. K? Thanks.

Do you see blogging as just a hobby or perhaps something more?

It’s a hobby that I take seriously. As I said in the first part, I’m glad I don’t rely on it for a paycheck. As for being paid, I’ve kind of wondered how much a single “google ad” widget on the site would generate. I get a couple hundred views per day, and I wonder if it could pay for my WoW account. Then again, people would maybe get pissy about it, but then again I never signed some thing saying I wouldn’t. I mostly just haven’t put one up because I live in Japan (lol, yen for payment? sif), and I’m anal about my blog’s layout. I don’t know where I could put it that wouldn’t be ugly. I’m headed back to the states soon (in like 4 days actually!), so I may toy with that in the future. I’m mostly just curious how it works. If it ended up being like 48 cents a month, I’d just can it, but if it was enough to finance my WoW, then I wouldn’t turn down free money. If anyone hated it, there’s certainly ways to turn it off. I run with a custom HOSTS file myself, so I don’t even see half of the internet. Whatever.

BATMAN: Robin? Hey yeah.. it’s Batman. Are you asleep? Yeah, me neither. Yeah, I had a bad dream. Look… is it cool… if I sleep with you tonight? Oh, Catwoman is over? I see. Well, when will she be– oh. She’s spending the night? She can have the sofa, I was going to sleep at the foot on your— oh… she’ll be at the foot of…? Oh… wait… what? You and Catwoman are… yes. I know.. I’ve seen her outfit, yes… it’s leather, I know… yes, and the whip? But what does that have to do with… Hello? Robin? Are you still there? I heard a clicking noise, and I thought… hello? Robin?

Do you have a schedule or some sort of routine you try and follow when blogging?

I write whenever I can. I hate churning out crap posts, and I usually don’t blog about the topic of the day. OH MY GOD HEROIC BADGES CAN GET YOU TIER WHATEVER. I don’t really care, and there are about a thousand other sites where you can read all about that. If I do chime in, it’s usually only if it’s something along the lines of “I’ve read a hundred posts about Topic Z, but no one seems to realize Unique Take on the Subject Q”. If I’m not posting along those lines, I either just agree with everyone else, or am just shocked into silence at everyone’s collective stupidity. That, or I posted my views already in someone else’s comments section, and hate repeating myself.

Batman: Look, I said I was sorry. I was zipping up the batpants and the grappling hook just went off. There’s a lot of stuff on the Utility Belt, ok? I didn’t angle it to ricochet off the urinal like it did on purpose, you know? You can hardly even see it in this light, and it’ll be dry soon anyway. It’s not like it’s gonna leave a stain, just man up and deal with it, god. I’ve had a hell of a batday, so just don’t press your batluck, okay buddy? Just be thankful it didn’t hit you in the eye. Christ, I need a batbeer.

Would you say there is some grind involved in blogging? If so, what is it and how do you tend to cope with it?

When I have a good topic, the posts just come out. When I don’t, I don’t really force the issue. Sometimes I go for a few days without a post, and the longer that goes the more I feel pressure to post something. I reaaaallly hate “sorry for not posting lol” posts, and tend to avoid them. When the time comes, there will be an update. Again, it isn’t my job, so fuggit. Penny Arcade churns out new stuff every MWF, but they’re also like gazillionaires and go the the office 8 hours a day to create a strip. I’m not them.

Batman: Don’t. Touch. The Bat Ears. K?

By contrast, what do you find pleasurable about blogging?

It’s very cathartic. I love when a post writes itself. I’ve written two short (fiction) stories (here and here), and was amazed especially when the first one just crapped out of my hands into Word. It was a weekday morning, and I had just finished teaching kindergarten classes, and would be teaching 4th grade in the afternoon. I sat down at my desk, and just BURNED that story out, and then read back over it and was “woah, where the fuck did THAT come from?”. A while later I wrote the second one, but I was forcing myself to try and make it happen. I like the way it turned out, but I disctinctly felt that I was MAKING it happen, instead of LETTING is happen.

As for regular posts, I just get a kick out of creating content. I love when people come read my thoughts, and respond to it. When someone opens a web browser, and decides to see if I personally had something new to say today, that’s pretty powerful. You feel important. Dunno. It’s hard to put into words. It feels good.

Batman: Schrkrew you Schcarecrow! NO! Geddover here and lemme give YOU a piesh of… HEY. PUDDIT DOWN. DOWN. on the ground, thassrite. GED OVER HERe you sexshy lil devil..! ROWR! Oh, hey come on shtoppit.. no … look.. just CUDDIT OUT. SHTOP. PUT. HEY. HEY. …HEY!@! OW. OW… OW FUG WHAT ARE YOU OW– OW! OW! FUG! WHATSAHELL SCARECROW THAT HURTS.

Would you care to share a particularly memorable moment from your blogging past?

Reading the replies to my first post over at NotAddicted. I knew I could do it, but until I actually DID it, it wasn’t real. Reading people responding to what I wrote was what hooked me.

Batman: Stop. Hammer time!

Have you ever considered branching into podcasting?

Oh, hell yes. I’d be a ham. I listen to like the GWJ Conference Call, and can’t understand some of the points they make. Like… if it was live, I’d be calling and hassling them all the time. I don’t listen to many podcasts, really, but think I would get a huge kick out of being on one. I’m pretty vocal on ventrilo during raids, and hate being in a PUG when people are like “wah wah my mics broke” or “lol do we really need vent for 3 drakes”. I LOVE being on guild runs where everyone knows each other and is comfortable joking during the run. I’ve considered making a podcast before, but I’m all alone here and don’t really have anyone else to run it with. I’ve even considered having one where I just start recording while my wife is cooking dinner and being like “OH MAN GRUUL GOT NERFED, WTF I MEAN RIGHT? WHAT DO YOU THINK HONEY?” and she’d be like “Uh huh, whatever babe. Gruul. Righht.” then just throw it up there for lols. Another idea I had was to just accost random Japanese in the grocery store and be like “HOLY SHIT, NEXT PATCH YOU CAN BUY TIER 9 FOR HEROIC BADGES, WHAT THE FUCK IS BLIZZ THINKING? ARE THEY JUST CATERIN TO TEH CASUALS?” and just record the Japanese grandma being like “what the fuck is this gaijin talking about?” in Japanese. I could even get my wife to help make subtitles, omg that would be priceless.

Off the blog and out of the game though, I’m pretty reserved. Many of these would require going out in public and making a huge ass of myself, and I live in a really small town where I’d get the stink eye the next day as I bought milk. Japanese don’t like to be put on the spot, but fuck that still would have been awesome. It could still be done in America, I guess. Just ask random people in the vegetable aisle how they felt about the latest nerf to DKs and just have them be like “I have no idea what the fuck you just said” but it would be all in English. Not half as funny, but maybe still good.

Honestly though, I’d love to be in on one so ANYONE OUT THERE. HIT UP IXO FOR THE PODCASTS, OK?

Batman: …Hi, my name is Batman, and let me tell you a little bit about myself: I like Twizzlers, and the Alligator Bar, and my favorite drama movie is Bloodsucking Freaks, just like your mama.

Are you pleased with how your blog has been received in the MMO blogosphere?

Yeah. Some people came with me from NA, but I’ve got a lot of new readers since going out on my own. I think I’m pretty well known in certain circles, and that feels good. I get crosslinked on some of the big ones, that still freaks me out. Like I’ll be just going about my thing, reading the sites I read, when I come across a link to myself and I’m like HEY, THAT LINK POINTS TO ME! WOO! I’M E-FAMOUS!

Batman: Let’s just say I’m exercising my right to remain silent, okay? I that cool with you guys? I MEAN THAT’S COOL, RIGHT? Jerks.

If you had a chance to do it all over again, would you do anything different?

Meh… it’s all worked out pretty well. I think starting at NA was the best thing I did, since I had a built in audience for my beginning. It must be hell for someone starting a brand new blog, and getting no comments at all day in and day out. I’ve seen some good blogs like that, and I always try to point to their blog if relevant. I wonder how many people actually follow links offsite, though, or if they only go for the one post I’m pointing out, and then never go back. I obviously can’t ‘rescue’ anyone, and it’s not up to me to advertise for them, but I know starting at NA where people could get to know me at a site they already visited for other reasons helped me build up my name, so when I did strike out on my own people already knew who I was.

Batman: ..No, but I once had a barber named Dominique? I’m selling these fine leather coats…

What advice would you give someone who wanted to try their hand at blogging?

The one thing I would say is to not be an island. The biggest draw of blogging is that we’re all on equal footing. When you write a story, don’t just sit there hitting F5. Go read other blogs and post comments on their stories. When I see a new commenter on my own blog, I usually follow their name back to their own site and poke around. Larisa at Pink Pigtail replies to almost every comment personally (@steve, @bobbi, etc). Don’t just stay on your own blog and wonder why people aren’t flooding in. Post intelligent comments on OTHER blogs you respect, and people will follow the breadcrumbs back home.

Batman: Don Guri Buta, Don Guri Buta, Don Guri Buta Tabete Sodatta, Don Guri Buta, Don Guri Buta, CELE-BUTAAAA

Can you picture a future where you will hang up your keyboard and no longer blog?

Not really. Unless I was forced to shut down my blog by an employer who didn’t like the idea of having employees reachable outside of company channels (a sad reality in some cases). In that case, I could see Ixobelle retiring, and a fresh new blogger named L.E. Boxi starting up a fresh new blog that same day 😉

Batman: Robin, Shatter. Robin, fuck! Soul Shatter you fucking twit. You’re climbing up on… what the fuck, shatter you retard! I can’t hold aggro, I’m a fucking… what, I AM DEVESTATING. I HAVE THE FUCKING GLYPHS. BOTH OF THEM. TWO SUNDERS PER, AND IT SPREADS ON TO A NEARBY..l. what the FUCK. GOD DAMMIT. ALFRED! Will you fucking bubble this … ROBIN! GET THE FUCK OUT OF … great…. fucking… ice block. Yeah. way to go, asshole. I hope you’re… WHAT THE FUCK CATWOMAN. WHY DID YOU WATSE A BREZ ON ROB– WHAT THE FUCK. FUCK. FUCK FUCK FUCK oh my god I swear to god, I’m gonna get in the batmobile and BLAST OFF AT THE SPEED OF SOUND AND KILL BOTH… oh my god.. no… alfred, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t…. oh my god. Wipe. just wipe … oh god, they’re all leaving the raid… guys, wait, it was just… we’ll get… WAIT GOD DAM—- ROBIN I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU START A NEW RAID AND TAKE EVERYONE FROM…. oh my god. fuck you guys. I hate this game.

You wake up to a world where you are the head of a company developing an MMO. You have unlimited funds and resources available to you. Please describe the kind of game you would make.

Oh my god, my MMO would be so boring. Combat would be slow and laborious, and everything would be such a huge hassle. I have pictures in my head of the mailbox being an actual post office, where you have to wait in line to talk to the NPC to mail auction goods out. Where you need to select a box of the appropriate size for the chestpiece, fill out CoD forms, and blah blah blah. There would be 5 NPCs, and if all of the were occupied you would need to take a number. Within this scenario, though, *receiving* mail becomes fun again. The NPC brings you a box full of boxes, and you know all those little green envelopes are from the auction committee and are stuffed full of payments. You can also see that that medium sized one probably has the helm that you won yesterday! You’ll need to drop it off at the blacksmith overnight so he can tailor it to fit you, or you can just throw it on loose and suffer a penalty to +hit until you can afford to refit it.

Situations like this create more interaction between the game systems, instead of shift clicking 15 mails in the span of 10 seconds and not even seeing what was attached until you look in your bags. The idea that you can carry 32 chestpieces is laughable… so many things like this that are just taken for granted are thrown out. People would complain it wasn’t streamlined, but fuck them. I have unlimited funds and resources. I’m making this game for me, and you’re welcome to join me, or eat a bowl of dicks and uninstall it.

Combat would be a slow, tiring process. Think of how much effort would go into swinging a 2 handed axe. You don’t just autoattack 50,000 times in a raid and call it a night. Think about Baseball, and think of all the prep that goes into a game. Then think about how much time Ichiro spends standing in the batter’s box. Then think about how often he gets a hit, much less a homerun. In WoW, we’re hitting homeruns every at bat, and we’re batting 98% of the time we spend in game. That’s all wrong. Combat needs to have impact, and you need to be acutely aware that you may not make it out of this fight if you just starting swinging around stupidly and pressing the same 4 buttons you pushed last time.

If you can see a monster, he can see you. No “walk 14 yards around him, because he aggros at 13.9”. All that crap needs to be thrown out, and an instance run where you fight maybe ten (*intense*, drawn out, life or death) battles, and then one boss encounter needs to be the norm. Then you recover for the night. You go back to the inn, and share your story with guildmates, and you all mentally prepare for the raid against the dragon on Friday night.

My game would flop. People would hate it. Fuck them. I hate people in general, and this is why 😉

Batman: …Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Good Night!