Can't touch this!

The race on horde side is over for tier 15.  Remix takes it.  Now the heroic fights start.

But before I even start waxxing poetic about heroic modes, I want to wax poetic about competition and gamers.

I grew up in a time when arcades were a thing.  I'm not talking about your Dave N Busters, or your mega bowling alleys with bars and pool tables and a few arcade games.

I'm talking about the places like Aladdin's Castle, or The Gold Mine (two of my memorable places in the local malls where I grew up).  Large rooms full of coin-ops, all of them making a million different noises, flashing lights, with people of all ages lining up or roaming around feeding quarters into each game.

When I was a kid (read as grade school, or elementary/middle school, depending on where you are from), the original Street Fighter hit the scene (1987 to be precise).  At the time, I was 9.  As a 9 year old, everyone in the arcades were much older and more imposing and threatening to me.  At that age, everyone is an adult, and they are all better at everything than you are.

There was an arcade code back then.  You put your quarter up on the cabinet, usually in either the left or right corner of the screen, and that signified to everyone standing around that "you had next".  Whomever lost, they gave up the controls, and you would step up and feed your money into the game, and you would take your crack at the current reigning champion.

For me, at 9 years old, that was the equivalent of asking the hottest girl in the world out on a date.  I was scared shitless.  For the longest time, I only played Street Fighter whenever nobody as at the arcade playing it.  I'd get the rare moment of time, usually very very early on a weekend when my parents would take me right when the mall opened.  During those times, I'd have my pocket full of quarters, and I'd play until other players showed up.  After that, I was too scared to keep playing, but I would stay and watch.  I noticed trends, learned all the "special moves", and on those mornings when I could practice alone, I learned how to play.

My first time playing against these "adults", I was pretty much shaking.  By this time, Street Fighter 2 had shown up (1991), and I was now 13.  Yeah, four years and a new version of the game later is when I grew the balls to try to play a real person at the game.  To me, they were all college guys, and they were loud, obnoxious, and they cursed and made fun of you and that was the first time I really learned what "trash talk" was.  A real cocky asshole was playing as Guile.  He played defensive, using sonic booms and flash kicks, since you could charge up those moves at the same time and still be blocking attacks constantly.  It was an infuriating play style, and it worked on most people.  Everyone's instincts are to play aggressive, moving in and jumping in and getting into their faces.  This guy was patient, and knew how to wait people out for the right moment to attack.

So I picked someone that, at the time and the meta game that was played most of the time (read shoot fireballs constantly), nobody ever picked.  Zangief.  I took my time, timed my movements and jumps just as he would do the wrong thing against me, and I would use his rediculously damaging throws and tossed the guy around, because you couldn't block a throw.  His defensive way to play would let me walk right up to him and man handle him all over the place.  It pissed him off, it made the crowd go nuts.  Because nobody played Zangief.  Nobody.  And this little 13 year old kid just did it and kicked the crap out of the guy.  My hands shook the entire time, I was sweating, I was ready to vomit.  I have no idea how I kept breathing, I was so scared the entire time.  But I won.  And that feeling, that right there, there was no greater feeling in the world, no where else to be than right there, right then, beating an adult, and hearing people around you, total strangers, cheering you on.

Since then, realizing I was actually pretty good at games, well then on, I started to take a new sense of satisfaction from beating people in them.  I hated losing, I lived for the win.  And I wanted it and expected it every single time.  The games would change, I would get older, and over time arcades would close and move to home consoles and pc's and the internet for multiplayer experiences, but I played them all.  I crave that win.  I still do.  I crave it in WoW, with raiding and with pvp (I just recently got back into WoW pvp again).  I still play LoL too, and I like to think I'm good there as well.

I'm a competitive person.  So is my wife, and everyone on my raid team.  We killed Lei Shen last night.  After about 30 or so pulls, and changing up our strat a couple times, but we finally killed him, and we did it first.  Not first for the server, Impudence has that honor.  And we don't compete with the few handful of 25man teams, there aren't any on horde anyways.  But for 10 man, we're number 2, and for horde, we're number 1.  And it feels damn good.

Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good right now.

Don't worry...be happy

Notoriety...

Do you have it when you think you have it, or do you have it and don't even realize it?

Celebrities know they have it.  How many people buy their movies, music, go to their sporting events, concerts, etc.  They have it easy, recognizing their notoriety.

What about the rest of us?

Everyone has their own types of notoriety, for sure.  Someone you work with might be notorious for being a loud mouth, or selling a lot of something, or being lazy, or any number of things.

Some gamers, and guilds, have notoriety.  Fatal1ty, Thresh, Swifty, SoloMid, Moscow Five, Blood Legion, Method, Dream/Paragon... I'm leaving a ton of other people out, but those are names that immediately come to mind for me.  YMMV.

What about local notoriety though?  As everyone who reads my blogs know, I play WoW.  On my server, I and my raid team are kind of a big deal, at least in our own eyes.  We're leading horde side raiding.  We're working Lei Shen this week, and fully expect him dead on Sunday.  We're not leading all raiding, but we're the team on top on horde.  Those assholes in Impudence and Apotheosis are good.

So yeah, we (Remix) lead horde.  But who really even knows us?  Does anyone follow us, checking out guildox or wowprogress to see what we are up to?  I know some people do, as some of us on the raid team will get messages every once in a while, other players checking to see how we're doing on progression, or just seeing what we are up to.  It's fun when that happens, that people are interested in how well you are doing.  It makes you feel proud, special, warm fuzzy feelings, etc. 

But do we really have notoriety?  Is there any such thing in WoW if you aren't a world first calibre guild/player?  I like to think that, on our little server (Elre'thalas US), that there is some.  Our server doesn't have the population of other servers with bigger name guilds/players, but we do have some. 

And yes, those of us on our raid team that have talked about this some fully understand that if we, as a team, were on other servers with more raiders/raiding guilds, we'd be way behind.  There are other servers with infinitely better teams playing on them.

We're not in that situation though.  We rule Eldre'thalas.  We didn't, for quite a while.  We were on alliance side.  Since Firelands came out.  And really we weren't our own guild until part way through Firelands.  Lots of drama there, nobody cares though, so I'm skipping the how and the why.  Short story, we're the new kids on the block, but we're also the best kids on the block.  Maybe, if we keep doing as well as we do, or hopefully improve and get better as players/raiders as a team, then maybe we'll be the absolute best on the server. 

Or maybe some other group of players will pass us up, who knows.  Or maybe Titan will come out (please God, oh fucking please come out already!!) and we'll move on to that game.

But for now, I'd like to think I've got some notoriety on my server, some clout, someone that other players look up to in some way, or envy, or hate, or whatever.  Makes me feel like some what of a special snowflake.  Makes me enjoy my life just a little bit more. 

And that's the ultimate goal, to enjoy life just a little bit more...right?

Titan thoughts...

No, I'm not bragging about my thoughts in general.  I had a chat with a guild mate, Drop who runs the second raid team, about Titan the other day.  We were initially talking about devs that they've put into the Titan project, and that made me check out some of the Titan rumormill websites.  If what some people are saying is true, I seriously can't wait for any official anything from Blizz about the game. 

So, this post is about my own kind of wishful dreaming about what Titan could be, what it could consist of, what my imagination would love to play...

There is talk about Titan being two kinds of games, a "sims" game, and an action "mmorpg" game.  Eve already does this to a very minor degree, where you have to spend time, real time, learning skills and stuffs.  I don't play Eve, so I don't actually have personal knowledge of how all that works, but I'm pretty sure on that. 

What does that really mean though?  From the rumors floating around, Titan's "sim" part of the game could mean all kinds of stuff we haven't seen before in a game.  A statement like that seems fairly "captain obvious" when talking about Titan, considering it's probably going to have boat loads of stuff we haven't seen in a game before.  But let's imagine.  Player run economies very similiar to real life real world economies.  Are we going to be playing a game where our characters interview for jobs, be accountants, walk to the corner grocery store and buy groceries, pay taxes, watch tv?  Who knows, but would we want to play that kind of game?

That depends.  A lot of people really love sim type games.  What if Blizzard took that idea and expanded it to such a degree that it is literally mind boggling to comprehend how much is available to do in the game, just in that part of the game?  Imagine a huge engine and system designed for all of our crafting, learning new abilities, trading, starting businesses, loaning money to others through banks, housing, clothing, etc.  Imagine small mom and pop type stores, then larger towns start to form.  Bigger cities.  Countries.  None of it pre-defined.  All of it player generated. 

I just threw out a ton of crap just there.

But imagine how the "sim" part of the game could pair with the "combat" part of the game.  What if the "time travel" idea is a real thing?  Okay, that basically means we have different time periods where combat will take place, and we can go back and forth into different times to "fight".  What if there aren't classes, but you have to "learn" in the "sim" part of the game?  What if wielding magic took research in a library or over the internet for your sim avatar?  If learning ancient languages would give you an advantage in finding treasure back in history?  What if learning higher level math would give you an advantage in futuristic gear/weapons?  There could be so many ways to pair the two "worlds" together in ways we can't even perceive of yet.  I have so many imaginative ideas here, and I know most of them won't be true, but what if we're all thinking all kinds of thoughts like this, and some of them are true?

Anyone who has read Ready Player One, you'll be imagining that game world as what Titan could be, and if you are like me, it seriously makes your inner geek freak the hell out.

I hope that Blizzcon this year gives us something substantial.  Until then, I guess I'll find stuff to pass the time, like WoW.