Should Blizz wave their banstick?

I saw a post today from Tobold about Suzina of Kill Ten Rats admitting to buying gold to purchase her dual spec at level 40.  I have read Tobold's post, I have read Suzina's post, plus the comments, which I feel were quite a mixture of arguments for and against.

One argument I have read says that 1,000 gold is too high for a level 40 character to make, so this partly justifies her feeling the need to buy the gold to buy the dual spec, another is asking why you need the dual spec at level 40 anyway when you only have half the talent points, and the rest is that buying gold is evil, as it supports hackers, etc.

The fact is that buying gold is against the ToS, and is a bannable offence.  Yes, I will admit to using cheat codes in single player games, but as you get older you come to realise that the only person you are cheating is yourself, and I stopped that a long time ago (I think Donkey Kong Country on the SNES is the last time I think I can truthfully say I used a code/sequence of keys to modify the intended game mechanics).

Additionally, the idea that 1,000g is too high a sum to achieve at level 40 is bollocks.  I have a level 21 lock (not listed) who has 3,700g to her name.  She herbs and inscribes, and sells boe greens and blues, and I have used her to fund a dual spec for Rohain, my priest, who is level 75.  It all depends on how much effort you are prepared to put in to play the game.

And I also agree with those that say that you don't really need dual spec at level 40 - level 60 is far more reasonable as you have more talent points, you have learned more about your class and it perhaps makes more sense to look at it then rather than 40.

But when all is said and done, if someone told me in game that they had bought gold, my reponse would very likely be the same; I would add them to my ignore list and raise a ticket.  In the medium term it would not make a difference as she has admitted that she would start over with a new account, but in the short term it would cause her inconvenience and a small amount of cash to buy another game and set up a new account. 

What do you think?

Another Guild First

Last night I fully intended to level some more, my map in Silvermoon is covered in little round circles at the moment which need to be taken care of:



And indeed I did manage to complete a few of these. I was busy getting my face ripped off by gnolls, Kumquat-style, when Tam asked if we wanted to go to Deadmines. I was level 15 by that time, and so Tam was able to use the LFD tool to port us all there, instead of walking/swimming/flying, and of course, dying.

We only wiped once, on the boat. I took a picture as I was going to use it to explain that once, a long time ago, on my very first character, I dotted the marked Pirate, which caused a wipe when the whole ship's crew appeared...




I unmarked the pirate, but I think that Tam may have upset it, because the whole ship's crew appeared, and we wiped...

I really wish I had Tam's talent for explaining things like this, as I am sure after reading his version I will be laughing rather loudly!

We got a guild first though, and downed Van Cleef at the end. Unfortunately I didn't get a pic of this, but Tam mentioned he would put it on the guild website later, so you can see it there. As soon as I see it I'll put a copy here too.

Honourable Mention!

I tend to spend my lunches reading WoW blogs, and am guilty of using Larísa's page of links to do this, because she has lots on there (but I still read Tobold first!).

Larísa has 3 (previously 4) what she calls 'Adrenalin Bloggers' - no idea why, but there you are! They don't appear to post very regularly, but I thought I would take a look at the one that posted yesterday (8 March), Reflections from the Pond.

I nearly fell off my chair - not only was Tahliana mentioned, but she had one of those little underliney things under her name!

In the space of one week, my blog has gone from no comments, to comments by Tobold and Tam, to actual links back to my blog. I have to say that this only has to be for one reason, Single Abstract Noun.

And I'll bet that Google is having a field day now with those three words - how long before my blog hits page 1 of the Google searches??!!!

I have to say that it is interesting to see other people's takes on their experiences as lowbie alts on a new realm with no links at all to their main characters. Yes, I guess I could probably lean on someone to help me get some of my Alliance wealth to my horde character, but I really don't want to, nor do I need to - I have picked Inscription as one of my professions, so hopefully should be able to make some decent cash before I start needing heavy duty amounts of gold.

Brief weekend update

Not much to report over the weekend, although it looks like some people in Single Abstract Noun are progressing well - when I logged on last night I saw that a group were in Wailing Caverns, and I have heard that a run of SFK has happened too. As for me, I did a few quests and went for another run in RFC with Tam in his new tanking role.

I levelled to 13 and saw that a couple of my quests had gone grey - one of the side-effects of running instances I guess.

I also cleared my mailboxes in readiness to move a couple of characters to the Steamwheedle Cartel server to free up a little more space on Argent Dawn for more characters; I really want to try out the worgen and goblin races when they become available.

Something I did notice last night was that there was no queue for Argent Dawn, which is unusual for a Sunday evening - I expect that this will be the norm until the new expansion hits, as people get bored with the current content and cancel their subscriptions for now.

Guild First

Wow. Just... wow!

I got up to level 10 last night on my mage, then a call went out - "who wants to do RFC?". At level 10 I really wasn't sure I was high enough level to go in there and make a valid contribution to the effort, but in fact all of us were of a similar level.

So in we went. No boosting, and we even had to use crowd control - a sadly missing element of the modern dungeon run. As you probably already know, today's dungeon runs mean that the tank collects everything up, then everyone else aoe's it down. Effective, but not very interesting.

True, most of my spells (including sheep) missed, I tried sheeping dotted mobs (after they had broken polymorph), but out of all of that, I think we only wiped twice, and one of those was when the hunter had popped out to get some more ammo!

The thing about our group was that we held together, there was no "gogogo" (well, actually, I did, for a joke!), no griping, and no silence. We communicated, fought cohesively, used our skills (such as they are at the lower levels) and got the guild first boss kill.

There has been talk of running WC and SFK soonish, and I for one am really looking forward to it - these are all places I have only ever been to solo, and (obviously) cleared the place with ease.

Oh, and I got my first comment yesterday, by none other than Tobold himself!

Single Abstract Noun

It has been some time since my last post, and I will make no excuses for it; I simply have not found anything interesting in WoW to post about.

I have been vote-kicked a few more times for apparently being a failtank, and have been spending my time in the Draenei and Night Elf starting areas to get the Loremaster Achievement. In the process I got exalted with both factions, and the epic ground mounts that comes with it, and my Gnomer rep is inching slowly towards exalted too.

I have also tried to make a serious effort to get my Draenei priest to 80, so finished off the BT quests and am about halfway through HF now.

But isn't that what everyone else is doing? There was a big surge in players when the new LFD hit, but now that the novelty has worn off I am seeing less dungeon queues and less instances (if you'll pardon the pun) of queueing for Argent Dawn itself.

So I guess I was maybe losing a little bit of interest, as the guild has a better tank than me now, and I kinda feel... redundant, I guess. And maybe a little bored with WoW, thinking that perhaps now would be a good time to catch up on other things that I have thought about doing but not really built up the motivation to actually do.

Then, in the blogosphere I saw that Tam has set up a new guild on my server (albeit horde side), called Single Abstract Noun. Tobold has joined, as has Larísa, plus I reckon a few others whose blogs I read, so I thought I would give it a go.

I had 2 spare slots which I was saving for a worgen and possibly (probably) goblin when Cataclysm hits, but now I am thinking of transferring one of my existing Alliance characters across to join the others that I transferred a while ago when the free transfer was first made available.

My son has a character on my account, and as he plays so infrequently it makes sense to probably move him over (with some gold in his pocket), plus maybe one of my other characters that I haven't touched in ages, but don't have the heart to delete - probably some false sense of attachment, but I haven't hit 50 characters yet...!

I really enjoyed being part of a community that just doesn't stop talking! I rolled a belf mage (yes, female!), typed /who tobold and asked him whether an officer was around for an invite. He replied by telling me that anyone can invite, then shortly later, Tahliana became a member of what could be a very large guild indeed.

I hit level 8 before logging for the night - it makes things a little quicker, having done the starting area a few times before!

I think I could be happy here

More pug stuff

It happened again.

We wiped in Pit of Saron, horribly, a few times, then I was standing in Dalaran, with that message telling me I had left the group. Sigh, another vote kick.

So I hit the LFD button again, got straight in again, and imagine my horror, when I found I had ended up in the same dungeon as before. I had a look at the other players, with this horrible premonition that perhaps I had been given not only the same dungeon, but the very same people who just kicked me.

Fortunately this was not the case. However, I did tell my new group that this was my second visit to PoS, my first visit literally minutes before when I got vote kicked for being a noob tank.

I was expecting cries of ‘leave then’ or similar from the gogogo crowd which regularly frequent these establishments, but I actually got a good-natured ok from the top dps in the group.

Much of the instance had already been done, and we were at the entrance to the cave before the last boss – the one with the big elemental.

We wiped, and I was expecting to get kicked again, following a comment from one of the party, but the response from the others was that I had told them, up front, what the score was.

I was then given a blow by blow account of what I needed to do in my role as tank, and guess what? We cleared the whole cave without wiping! The same person then went through what I needed to do with the boss, and things were going fine until he went down, then one of the other dps went down, so it was left to me, the healer and another dps to try and take him down. We ultimately failed, but I had a much better experience in this visit than the previous one.

If there is a moral to this story, be upfront before you start; sometimes you’ll be telling a bunch of asshats who will kick you, but more often than not you’ll actually get a decent bunch of people who really want to help.