Free Candy For Everyone

As I mentioned in this previous post, I’ve been studying Kung Fu for several years. Yesterday I tested and passed my 10 Short Defense, which are moves to throw your opponent to the floor. Ten different ways to slam someone into the ground, pretty fun to do, not so fun to have done to you.

Anyway, I’m now closing in on the four year mark in my training. And I started thinking about if life were more like video games. The only class left that I hadn’t tried in World of Warcraft was the rogue, so I started a Dwarf Rogue yesterday (Dwarves being one of only 2 races that I hadn’t tried either). In about 45 minutes of play I got to level 6, ranked up my skill in Daggers to 30 and slaughtered hundreds of boars and trolls. Ok, maybe not hundreds, but definitely tens. If my character’s training progress proceeded like my real life training process, she would have gotten MAYBE one dagger point of skill in that time frame. And certainly not leveled up 5 times.

I’m sure glad that video games aren’t too much like life. The interesting thing is that in real life, there are small things that are equally as rewarding as the big things. For example, when I was working on and practicing my Short Defense, I would have little moments of success where some concept really clicked in my mind. Successfully executing each of the throws requires many small pieces to be done in a particular way. Every time I get closer to correct on any one of those pieces, it’s a small victory.

So maybe my analogy is skewed - perhaps passing my test yesterday was more like leveling up. By that system, I am now a level 9 Kung Fu novice. And each piece of my progress, each small win in understanding a technique is a skill level increase.

I am a total and complete nerd. Isn’t it great?

The Barrens is a very large zone where most low level Horde players spend a large chunk of their time. It has a huge number of quests spanning levels 10-25, approximately. What this tends to mean is that there are a lot of idiots saying stupid things in general chat in the Barrens. I’m not quite sure why, but maybe it’s because you have more casual, younger players at that level range. You have to be taking the game a bit more seriously to get up past that level range and into the mightier zones, I suppose.

So whenever you enter the Barrens, you must be prepared to be innudated with idiocy. I recently got a new weapon, a lovely two-handed mace called the Twig of the World Tree. Unfortunately, up until this point, I’d been using staves exclusively. So I had no skill in using two-handed maces, which means I couldn’t hit anything. I decided to stop by the Barrens to level my mace skill with no hassle (since I’m level 54, I knew I’d be able to just miss my targets for however long and still not have to worry about dying). To my pleasant surprise, Barrens chat was actually amusing.

Normally, we’re forced to suffer through a deluge of Chuck Norris jokes. You know, the Chuck Norris facts website is funny. Statements like “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.” are so completely ludicrous that they pull a little smile out of me. But how many times can some silly teen yell “well Chuck Norris would kick your ass” in general chat before it becomes old? I think, for me, 2. Two times. Er. Or maybe even just one.

To my surprise, the topic of the day in Barrens chat was the movie Spaceballs. People seemed to really know their Spaceballs. They were pulling out all sorts of random funny quotes from the movie. Not that I can recall any right now (One that always sticks out to me is the “We’re combing the desert!”, but that requires the visual queue of the storm troopers using a gigantic comb on the sand to really be truly funny). I’ll just say it was a welcome change. Of course, if people end up yammering on about Spaceballs all the time, I’ll probably just be back in a few weeks wishing they would all change the subject already. Heehee.

My main character in World of Warcraft is an Enchanter. This is a profession that isn’t a great money maker, as it requires standing around in cities and hawking your wares in public chat channels. Most other professions craft some sort of item that players usually sell for profit on the ingame auction house. Enchanters actually have to interact with their customers, as we put enchantments onto our customers existing items.

I don’t like to spend a lot of my playing time standing around and waiting for customers. I want to go out and fight stuff! So it maybe wasn’t the best profession choice for me. Regardless, I’ve dutifully leveled it up, and been excited when I got new enchants to cast on myself and my guildies. But when in the cities, I always keep an ear open for someone asking for the services of an enchanter. Tonight I responded to a request to produce some Enchanted Thorium for someone.

This is an item, so I guess it’s one of the few exceptions to the “Enchanters don’t produce stuff” rule I mentioned above. We can make the Thorium, which takes a Thorium bar obtained through mining and some magic dust that us enchanters have, and poof, we magic it up. Similarly, we can make Enchanted Leather. These are required for some crazy end game armor sets. So I was happy to help, I was just passing through and figured, “Sure, why not?”

So the guy gives me the materials, I make the bars, we open a trade, he puts in some gold pieces, I put in the thorium bars, and we both hit the “Trade” button. A couple minutes later the guy whispers me and says “I’m going to report you, you didn’t give me the bars!” Um. Sure enough, I check my inventory and the bars are in it. I try to calm the guy down, obviously I’m not trying to cheat him. There’s no way I can do some crazy slight of hand and make him think we did a trade if we didn’t. The guy is claiming that I even got his gold, but he didn’t get the bars. It’s just really not possible for me to have manipulated that.

I eventually calm him down, drop the bars in the mail, and tell him it’s done. It takes a full hour for mail to arrive, so I wander off to quest and forget about the whole incident. Until I get another tell from him. “I’m going to report you, it’s been over an hour and still no bars!” I don’t know what to say. At this point, my game decides to disconnect. I’m thinking that looks bad, like an admission of guilt. Uhoh! But I get back on and apologize for the disconnect and tell him that I mailed it. I finish it off with “If you don’t get it by tomorrow, go ahead and report me if you want, I sent it to you. There’s nothing more I can do. Please let me know when you get it.”

After that he got quiet, so either the bars showed up in his mailbox and he felt like a tool for his accusations or he reported me and didn’t wanna pester me anymore since he felt like it was in bigger hands now.

This whole thing totally sucks. I was just trying to be helpful, and apparently there was some weird bug that caused the trade to not complete even though we thought it had. Now I have some person who’s out to get me out there. I really hope the mail got through and the guy calmed down. I don’t think Blizzard would really take any action against me on the basis of one minor complaint of me cheating them (come on, I bet people get cheated for real all the time by people who mean to swindle them - I don’t know that that’s even against the terms of service), so I’m not really worried. But the whole thing was irritating!

I gave the Heroes of Might and Magic V demo a try this weekend. It’s the next in a long line of turn-based strategy games. I remember well the first time I discovered the HOMM series. It was my sophomore year of college, and I downloaded the demo for HOMM2 to give it a whirl. I played that demo over and over and over, for so many hours, late into the night.

I eventually picked up a copy of it, and played it addictively. When HOMM3 came out, I was psyched. I picked up HOMM3 and then HOMM4 when it came out. But somehow, that initial excitement became diluted. All the basic gameplay elements were there - you control heroes (who gain experience and skills) and move them around a map collecting resource nodes, recruiting troops, and capturing cities. However, the latest iterations just weren’t very good. More of the same isn’t always all you need.

The HOMM5 demo is good. I think I spent at least 5 hours playing it this weekend, and I might give it another try. I can’t quite say what made this so much better than HOMM4, but I was enthralled. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t played a HOMM game in so long, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was a beta earlier and the news about it wasn’t so great, but it looks like they turned things around. This was a solid demo, and it looks like it could be a good game.

Apparently TBS is showing the Lord of the Rings trilogy this weekend and decided to put together some comical trailers to attract people’s interest. It’s a great idea. I mean, everyone knows what the movies are about. We don’t really need another dramatic trailer to decide if we are gonna like the movies or not!

Here’s the page that links to all of the trailers. My favorites are probably Secret Lovers (oh yes, you read that right) and Gollum (trailer tagline “Are you smelly, strange and without a friend to call your own? This slimy fellow can relate.” Nice.)

[Via Cinematical]