It's the end of the world as we know it!

As the Mists of Pandaria expansion comes to a close, I'd like to take a bit of time to reflect on it.  

So over the entire expansion, we've had a lot of changes.  Pet battles, farms, new raid modes, scenarios.  Man, Blizz really threw a lot at us, especially the longest end tier ever, ungh, a year and a half Blizz?  Really?

On the guild side of things, holy crap a lot has happened.  We switched factions just before the expansion started.  We had a complete guild breakup mid ToT.  We ended up having three separate 10m raid teams.  We even dabbled early on in SoO with h25m, getting up to spoils if I remember correctly.

We've had some people come and go, and we've actually experienced guild and server growth at the end of the expansion when typically there is the exact opposite.

Cillie reformed the guild under her sole leadership.  Yes she'll say I help run things, but really we all know she does like 99% of the work.  And she's pretty damn good at it, since we all like being here.

Then we got the worst news imaginable.  Cillie has an as-of-yet incurable form of cancer.  When that could have caused rifts or drama, instead it brought us all even closer together.  I opened my big fat mouth about it, and how much we want to thank Blizzard for making these great games, which led to an outpouring of support from complete strangers over the internet than I could have ever imagined.

In the face of something horrific, we've found people that truly care for us, that are helping us live a dream that we've had since the first days of us playing WoW together, which is to go to Blizzcon together.  With everyone's help, both in real life and through WoW, we're getting to do just that.  And Chinglish, twitch streamer from Australia, is donating his hotel room to us!  I mean how fucking cool is that huh?!

It's been a hell of a year, in every way possible.  Becoming the front running horde guild on ET.  Midnight Reverence may want to contest it, but they really can't, kudos to them though, they're a solid group of people there.  

So we find ourselves in an amazing position.  We've got more members that have grown in skill together.  Cillie's gotten even better than before at keeping a guild full of crazies working together.  And me, well, I guess I'm still qualified to lead a team, hopefully that continues. ;)

I want to give a shout out here to all the men and women that have raided with me.  The group comp has changed a lot over the entirety of MoP, but the core philosophy, culture, and atmosphere has stayed a constant.  That's something that will stay as well as we move into WoD in just a few weeks.

While some of you have raided in the guild, but maybe not with me in progression, I look forward to having that opportunity with you in the 30m flex normal/heroics and in the 20m mythic mode.  For some of you who haven't done progression raiding, pushing server first type of raiding, it can be a lot of fun and extremely rewarding.  It's a struggle for sure, but those kills at the very top end of the difficulty are extremely satisfying.

For everyone looking at that type of raiding in WoD, be as prepared as you can be.  Blizzard is making tons of changes to every class, professions, all sorts of stuff.  Once raiding opens up after the first two weeks of WoD launch, be ready to hit all those bosses hard and fast.  We're going to prove to the entire server that we are the horde on ET.  Lok'tar ogar!

Most importantly, thank you all, every member, for being a part of our WoW family.  This isn't a guild without each of you.  I'm proud to play this game, spend my time, with you.  Thank you for making this game so fun for me!

Now let's get ready to beat up some orcs of lore, and show them what a real horde is like!  For the horde!

A new mode for WoD...

So I spent the past few days trolling the MMO-C forums like usual.  I came across what I considered a troll post about how Blizz is trying to kill off casual progression raiding, and it was filled with the usual suspects, people talking out of their asses and not making much sense.

It naturally started with how Blizz is making 10man guilds second class citizens.  The LFR crowd bitched at how they aren't getting real loot.  And the people that never raid complained at how their dungeon gear can't compete.

However, there were the shining few who explained the reasons why Blizz was changing raid size formats and stuff.  Mixed in between all of that, an idea sparked in my mind.

It’s a warm summer evening, circa 600 BC, you’ve finished your shopping at the local market, or agora, and you look up at the night sky. There you notice some of the stars seem to move, so you name them planetes, or wanderer.

Just kidding, but I love that scene in BBT where Sheldon tries to teach Penny physics.

So Blizzard has a lot of different types of content.  You have three man scenarios.  Five man heroic dungeons.  Ten to thirty man for LFR, normal, and heroic raids.  Twenty man mythic raids.  On top of all these, differing levels of rewards.

What if, maybe as filler content between raid tiers, they could develop ten man content.  This content would let them showcase other story lines away from the main raid content.  They could make the rewards equivalent to LFR, so it isn't required for Mythic raiders.  It would be something that is a higher challenge than heroic dungeons and LFR, allows them to explore more lore, and is completely optional.  They can periodically release new ten man content after each raid tier to give more stuff for people to do.  This could be very helpful at the end of expansions, where there are huge amounts of time with players getting bored.  They could release little zones, tuned at a slightly higher difficulty than LFR, so coordination would be required, but being twinked out wouldn't be needed, nore would it require everyone to be the perfect raider or have the perfect group comp to complete.

This would give the casual audience, the lore audience, something to do that wouldn't require set days or times, something that could be completed within just a couple hours if one-shotting.  You would have to be in a pre-formed group like our current Flex model.

I don't quite know what I would call this mode yet.  But that is my idea.

The love of my life, the reason I'm here.

Certain things happen in life that completely change your perspective on, well, everything.  Something can happen, some singular event, that spins everything in on itself.  You realize that what you worried about from day to day, things you planned for the future, the mundane parts of your life fall away, like leaves off a tree, and just the trunk of the tree stays, what really matters.

My life is like that tree now, stripped bare of all its leaves, small branches falling away, to show just a trunk, a few thick branches, but everything else has left, fallen, littered the earthen floor below.

I'm not the best at spoken word when I'm trying to convey emotions.  When my emotions run strong, my brain tends to shut off.  But the written word, when I have time to let my brain formulate what it wants to express, I do believe that I have a modicum of ability in this regard.

I've used this blog as an outlet to my passtimes.  Looking back now, I realize how fortunate I was to be able to spend my time on such things.  This isn't to say that my missives on that part of my life are being stopped.  I'm sure I still will in some way.  However the filter, the perspective, the frame of reference, has changed the focus of what I write about.

And now for the reason behind all these words I've strewn before you, my few dear readers.  On Thursday, July 31st, 2014, my wife, Tabytha Holland Armstrong, was diagnosed with cancer.  Initial tests show it to be aggressive, and the doctor's initial estimates give a year.

Yes, it feels like Wile E Coyote has dropped the Acme Anvil on us.

We aren't taking this lying down.  We're going to explore everything possible, different treatments, experimental drugs, anything.  But for now, realization is hammering home.  As I said, speaking can be difficult for me.  But I can write much better.

So many thoughts have gone through my mind.  The rage at how this...thing...this faceless monster can infect my wife and take her away from me.  The despair at how I'm given this finite amount of time with her.  A million other emotions.

My wife has cancer.  This woman, this glorious, beautiful, brilliant human, who loves her family and friends with a force of will that I've never experienced before, has something inside her that wants to consume and kill her.

You see this on tv, in movies, but real life?  It doesn't work out the same.  There isn't a montage of doctors working together.  There isn't a commercial break and then coming back to people working out a cure.  This is sitting in a room with her, her parents, as our emotions overwhelm us.

All that day I'd had moments of crying, of emotions taking me to very dark places.  But not a major breakdown, not then.  For me, my heart broke the early morning after.  At four in the morning, I woke up and got out of bed and began typing a message to a friend.  While trying to compile everything as I typed on my keyboard, my hear felt as if it would burst, and tears poured out of my soul.  My body closed itself, all my muscles tightening in unison, my voice screaming in silence as my brain wanted to scream in ways inhumanly possible.  I cried in a way that my body has never felt before.  This pent up rage, fear, hate, despair, it poured out of me, left me exhausted as it coursed through and out of me.

Why her?  Why now?  I've only know her for seven years.  Seven.  When my life was planned around growing with this woman, taking her away at the age of 33 is cruel.  It's not enough time.  I barely know her.  We've just started our lives together, and now these cells want to end her.

There are so many things I want to do with her.  

I want to watch her have a career in nursing, somethin that she has just finished school for just two months ago.

I want to travel the world with her, visit other countries, try so many things, see so much.

I want to buy our first house with her.  Pick furniture.  Paint colors for walls.  Buy our first car.  

I want to celebrate a tenth anniversary, fifteenth, fiftieth.

I want her to see her niece that is about to be born.  Watch her grow up, get to know her, do things and go places with her.

Movies, tv shows, books, games, music that I know she wants to see happen, to share with her, that now may not ever happen.

We've shared ourselves through gaming.  Mario, Halo, WoW.  We've built this bond in WoW.  We've created something in it together.  We've built this digital home, where people have come, shared themselves with us, these people from all over the world, who have found my wife, who have decided that she, the atmosphere she's created, this world she's formed around her, they all want to be a part of it.  They are all a part of her.

This point in the world, that so much revolves around, that is the center of my life, my being, others even orbit her, there is this chance that it will end.  Soon.

It crushes me, like that anvil if it were to hit the Road Runner.  In the cartoons it doesn't.  It always misses.  But this isn't the cartoons.  This is the real world, where anvils fall on people all the time.

But I refuse to believe this is the end.  I hear all the time of how people were told they had months to live an they live on for decades.  I refuse to believe that my reason for living is going away any time soon. This can't, won't, be what ends my wife.  

This does change me.  In all sorts of ways.  Perspectives, outlooks, beliefs.  I hope that this is just a way for is to change together, and not something that seperates us permanently.

But maybe I found something.  I've been talking with others, her parents, friends, family.  Maybe there is a reason for this.  I feel like this isn't the end, just the start of something else for us.  Something we need, have needed for a long time.  This is how it is shown to us.

All of you who read this, I love you all, hold you all close in my heart.  Thank you for being in my life.

That's all I have for now.  I'll be writing more often.  This helps my heart.

2+ lane roads...

Okay, I'm going to get old school ranty on this one, like, Dennis Leery bitching people out.

Multi-lane freeways, that's where you have more than one lane going in the same direction, obviously a huge metric fuck ton of you out there have no clue how to drive on them.  At all.

First off, some basics:

"Slow traffic use right lane".  You don't have to be some CIA cryptologist to figure this out.  If you are driving slower than those around you, put your ass in the right fucking lane.  Don't sit in the left lane thinking it is okay, because it fucking isn't.  Put your blinker on, and get your slow ass the fuck over.

Side note, use your fucking blinkers.  None of us cab read your retarded minds.  Same with headlights at night.  You probably aren't wearing a seatbelt either, you lazy shits.

"Passing".  Now a good driver will be cruising in the right lane, no matter their speed.  When they come across a driver in front of them, they will singal their intent to pass them on the right, check their mirrors, change lanes and, once a few car lengths beyond the passed vehicle, merge back into the right lane.

If you see others that are moving faster than you and about to pass you, don't fucking cut them off because you think that if you don't get into the left lane right fucking then, then you'll be forever stuck in the right lane.  Let the faster traffic pass both you and the car in front of you, THEN you can pass.  Or, an alternative which is perfectly fine, is to speed up and pass at a speed that does not impair the speed of others.

Now, if you are "passing" someone, but you are going the same speed, or even so barely faster that it will take several minutes to pass the traffic on the right, then guess what, yer the fuck-tard.  That's right, you are the assclown that is fucking everything up for everyone else.  Get a little more speed and get the fuck around an over.  Trust me it's okay, you can slow back down again once you are back in the right lane.  You really can use your gas pedal a little bit harder for a few seconds, it's not going to kill you.

"Cruising".  I don't give a rats shitty asshole if you are in a fucking McLaren, it doesn't matter if you are doing 160 miles an hour.  If you aren't actively passing someone, get over into the fucking right lane you asswad.

In short, people, quit being inconsiderate clueless dipshits on multi-lane roads.  You should have been tested on this simple shit when you got your liscence, and it isn't like this shit is fucking rocket science.  And if you know you do this type of shit and you just don't care, then you, sir or madam, can suck a thousand dicks.

I'm a real wild one...real wild child

If you didn't get the hint, I'm considering Wildstar.  Pre-ordering has started, giving everyone all the usual shit, pre-order only items/mounts/housing/blah blah blah.

But yeah, I think I might just casually play Wildstar.  I need something else, something that I don't have to be so desperate to min/max all to shit.  Which I'll probably do anyway.  But maybe I won't be as compelled to.  Let that be WoW/D3 for me.

Short and sweet.

Randomness, no witty title here...

Some times I wonder about people, the decisions they make, why.  This is going to be me rambling for a bit.  Skip this post if you don't care about my inner thoughts.

I'm glad we switched to 25's when we did.  There is a lot of headache going on.  You'll read, maybe even reread those two sentences and think they don't belong together.  But they do.

Why am I glad for the headache?

Two situations.  Situation A takes place now, while we are stuck in SoO.  Situation B is the launch of WoD.  In both situations, a guild is restructuring from 10's to 20/25's.  People deciding to quit, take breaks, join other teams, other servers, all sorts of crap.  To me, situation A is better for that to take place, while the tier is old news, the 'race' is over, people are progressing at their own pace.  Situation B puts pressure on everyone, and any kind of slowdown is catastrophic.

Thankfully, we live in situation A.  Found out some people weren't actually interested in the larger raid size when they said they were.  Found out that people were already pushing their computers to their limits on 10's and 25's were unplayable.  Found out some people couldn't handle that we'd be in SoO for as long as we are going to be.  Found out some people are just dicks.

Also found out that there are a shit ton more people out there looking for a home.  Found out that some people are going to help simply because they like the people they are playing with and want their group to succeed.  Found who real friends are, even with internet anonymity.

I'm not upset at anyone.  Sure there is disappointment from time to time.  Disappointment at all that time spent with some people, and it means nothing.  I mean philosophy hasn't changed, guild is still being ran the same as ever.  So that means that other people's intentions have changed.  And that's fine, it's going to happen, unavoidable.  Just leaves a sour taste.

Anywho.  I'm enjoying the group we got, and look forward to the next expansion.  It can only be better.  

And I've seen what happens when I'm not around.

A little birdy whispered to me today...

Well, I can't exactly say what it is, naturally.  But let's just say that something I've been waiting for from a certain game company has finally happened.  Can't really go into much more, NDA and stuff.  But yeah, today is a damn good day.

Top ten all time days.