Celestial Speed

Blizzard are an intelligent lot. For all that Trade might try, the point really can't be argued: the other night they were pulling in millions of pounds via a queue numbering in the hundred-thousands, and they did it through well-considered use of ponies. To be more precise, the Celestial Steed. Other blogs have already delved into estimating the enormous profit, so I'm going to leave them to it, as there's another area of discussion much more suited to my maths-retardant brain.

Specifically: what the flying horse are thousands of people doing throwing their cash into pixels?

The mount is, essentially, purely aesthetic. Alright, it spares you the in-game cost and toil of trundling over to your friendly local mount vendor and snagging a new steed every time your riding skill escalates, but the cost is so low these days it's negligible. Defending your purchase from a standpoint of convenience alone is going to be difficult. In fact, I suspect most people who're doing this are actually just a little bit afraid of admitting something closer to the truth: they're buying it because it's really, really pretty. And there's a word people tag to you when you buy stuff because it's really, really pretty: superficial.

Superficial - RELATING TO THE SURFACE.
Relating to, affecting, or located on or near the surface of something.
A superficial wound.

As this is entirely to do with a mount skin, it's exactly the right word. The problem lies in the reams of social stigma surrounding this notion: buy something just because it's pretty and you risk being materialistic and focused only on aesthetics. Perhaps you're even a wee bit stupid because you're paying for pixels in a game.

Those that are entirely caught up on that idea need to stop and think for a moment. If you're playing World of Warcraft, I'm afraid you already are paying for pixels in a game. Even if you do it to make new friends or spend time with old ones, you witness everything going on in WoW, from chat to damage output to that nice new loot, through pixels on your screen. So be careful, least you find your argument turns in a lot of “only in some cases” or perhaps “just not in my case” because of your own monthly subscription fee.

Nevertheless, there is some weight to what these people are saying. Buying anything simply because it's pretty, be it a new shirt or a new winged horse, cannot logically be justified. The thing that several members of both sides seem to be missing is that no one is buying it simply because it's pretty. They're buying it because it's pretty and pretty is going to make them happy.

Let me go all anecdotal on you.

The night before the Celestial Steed was released, I split from my boyfriend of three years. While I had prepared myself for that – hell, I instigated it – it knocked me back a bit nevertheless. By the following evening I had a headache and that lingering nausea of recent loss. Not the stuff of violent heartbreak, but suffice to say I was on a downer. Then I found out about this horse, and my immediate reaction was I deserve cheering up. Not “it'll save me a few minutes' travel time and a handful of gold for my alts”, not “it'll boost my mount count for that achievement”, not “I'll be able to hang around Dalaran with the cool kids!” I wanted to nab me some happy and damn, what is a sparkly winged horse if not that?

My purchase has provided exactly what I wanted. I bought it, rode around on it with a mate, and just generally had fun. Not just that, but the depth of my love for shiny horses has left me gleeful every time I log on to find my character sitting on one.

To summarise, I bought something aesthetically pleasing. It made me happy. It doesn't need rationalising any further: as soon as you stop looking at superficial assets and considering them as something shiny with no additional benefits, as soon as buying pretty translates correctly to buying happy, it ceases to be something to get defensive about. It ceases to be worthy of derision.

Identity Crisis: Resolved

So, I've had quite a lot to say lately. Lots of interesting new changes to the game, lots of Cataclysm speculation, lots of class-related discourse, a bit of GearScore-related bitching, even some roleplaying posts. Yet the blog remained silent.

This is because I've felt unable to reconcile the name of this blog – which refers to my bone-thin warrior tank – with the characters I've been playing lately. I'd write a page about my fire mage or my multi-tasking druid, then scrap the whole thing because I wasn't sure it belonged here. And as Aelys is still sitting unplayed on rotten old Moonglade it rather looked like Skinny Tank was over.

Then, the other day, as I was tanking Utgarde Keep for the first time in ages as my death knight, Daelythir, I realised what I was doing internally as I looked at certain pulls.

This particular pull was the one just before the first boss, Prince Keleseth: two mobs on either side of a wide table, two of them prone to pausing to self-buff when aggroed. As a death knight, I generally pull the closest on one side with Icy Touch, throw down Death and Decay, yoink the furthest loitering Runecaster with Death Grip, Plague Strike the first one, spread diseases with Pestilence, reactivate a blood rune with Blood Tap and immediately Blood Boil. The thing is, I hadn't played my Death Knight in a while so I found myself having to puzzle this chain of actions in the split second before I reached the mobs. And in the absence of a class-specific game plan, I defaulted to warrior.

Pull with ranged weapon, use Heroic Throw on a Runecaster, toggle on Cleave and Charge a mob that's roughly central, Thunder Clap, Shockwave. Engrained in my brain. As a WoW-player, I am a warrior at heart, and the experience of playing warrior for so long happens to be very useful when playing other classes. Mob positioning; controlled pulling; marking; keeping up the pace: all of these skills are wholly transferable to any other tanking class. Meanwhile, knowledge of mob abilities and which are worth actively countering; knowing when to start nuking; knowing when to or why not to root, CC or snare; understanding the tank's likely threat levels on each mob before AoEing: these are all very useful from a DPS role.

With this in mind, I've finally established this blog's defining thread: it is a blog from the point of view of a warrior tank. It is no-longer solely about warrior tanking, it's just written by a girl who happens to think like one. “Musings of the paper-thin meatshield” - now with boundless subject matter. Hoo-hah.

The PuG Queue Redefined (or: I am Amused by Blizzard's Sledgehammer)

Once upon a time, a night elf rogue by the name of Sevielle squatted in Ironforge. Although she would have much rather been out questing for great justice and farmable loot, this was not an option, for Sevielle wished to do an instance, and to do an instance, she needed Ironforge general chat.

“LF3M to UBRS,” cried one persistent tank, and she recognised the name as the same fellow who had been seeking members over an hour ago. “Just need healers!” he continued, quickly explaining everything. “PST!”

Sevielle rather doubted anyone would send him that tell for at least another forty minutes. Buttering a crumpet out in the real world, she mused vaguely that if she was especially lucky she might actually gain her first member for a group to Stratholme before mister Upper Blackrock zoned into his instance.

Some eighteen months later, Sevielle had inexplicably morphed into Miriah the Forsaken shadowpriest and was idly flying from the Undercity to Arathi to poke the PvP vendor there. Text gushed across her chatbox in the bottom left of her screen.

“Tank LFG SM Cath!”
“WTS [Righteous Orb]!”
“TRADE in TRADE, idiot.”
“Stop spam.”
“When you say stop spam, you're spamming, duh.”

World-wide LFG had been born and already Miriah's brain had learned to compensate by only reacting to certain combinations of letters, namely MC, Strath, Scholo and LBRS. Nevertheless, some subconscious part of her brain couldn't help but twitch at the escalating idiocy the world-wide channel apparently provided, and deduce that the added convenience of being able to travel while seeking an instance group just wasn't worth it. She would later roll her eyes and tut “I told you so” when Blizzard apparently came to the same conclusion and world-wide LFG was no more.

More time passed, and Miriah became Aelystriel the Forsaken warrior, scratching her head as she worked out defence scores, checked AtlasLoot and chose instances from drop-down boxes. Irritatingly, she could only queue specifically for three instances at a time, but it didn't take long for her to realise that, once queued for anything at all, she could click the LFM tab and search through every single heroic instance for a group or group-like gathering of un-grouped people.

First, she chanced across a group of two paladins, a druid and a priest for heroic Steam Vaults. Brilliant, she thought, and sent the leader a quick tell.

“May I join as tank or DPS?”

A long pause. She wondered vaguely if the group leader was trying to find her and inspect her, as they were both in Shattrath. Another player asked her to come tank for him in heroic Mechanar, but as she'd already asked the other group she felt bad about potentially having to let the first fellow down and said no.

“Need healer or DPS,” came the reply at length, and she noticed that he was indeed standing right next to her.

“Brilliant,” she replied immediately, “I'd love to DPS.”

“You are prot,” he stated simply.

“Well, yes, I'll respec.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No time.”

“It really won't take that long.”

“Respec takes time.”

“But surely you already have one member who's volunteered to respec if you need 'healer or DPS'.”

“Full now.”

Aelystriel sat in Shattrath and practised facedesking. As if whispering strangers wasn't irritating enough without exchanges like that. Time passed and she metamorphosed from warrior to rogue to warlock to disc priest to blood death knight to frost death knight to druid to warrior to paladin to mage, and over the course of it all she slowly ceased whispering group leaders and potential group members altogether. Her little comment in the LFG tool said all she needed to say, so frankly those other people could whisper her and save her quite a bit of effort. Occasionally, when she had come home late and tipsy, she would log on and wax lyrical to close friends about the slow degradation of human contact within the game. She remembered a time, oh yes, when she had to sit and talk in a chat channel to get a group! Oh, she thought, easily skimming over the hours wasted in Ironforge, those were the days. To have to speak to people again...!

It was around this point when she changed again into Daelythir the dual-wielding frost death knight. Although she might have been perplexed by her new gender, this was all easily overruled by such a huge change she wasn't quite sure what to make of it: cross-server LFG.

Cross-server LFG came complete with ticky boxes, which the she-male inspected while hovering over the Stadium in Hellfire Peninsula, waiting for unsuspecting Alliance to kill for Marks of Thrallmar. Tick one to queue as DPS, tick the next to state she was quite willing to tank, select “Queue for random dungeon” from the dropdown box and then hit the button marked queue. Within minutes she had a group, the result of a painless process that required no effort on her part. No cries of “LFG!” in a chat-channel, no humble whispers to an irritable party leader, no rejection and no endless clicking through instances to find a group for a heroic, any heroic, only for every party to lack a helpful comment announcing what they needed.

Oh yes, thought Daelythir as his/her Howling Blast stuck a magnificent triple pull of nine mobs to him like Taffy to the roof of one's mouth, Blizzard had done it this time, hadn't they. Mindlessly easy group formation. And all it took was to remove human interaction from the process. Funny, that.