Monday, June 27, 2011

Short Post - Chat Rooms




I sat down and considered which way I wanted to go with this topic. I’ve been frequenting chatrooms off and on for years and they can be a very mixed bag. Met a few decent friends who I still keep in contact with via them but a lot of the time you meet temporary acquaintances and even more often than that  you meet people not worth mentioning.

You can see this even on online games like the well known MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) where the internal chat system tends to display all the worse aspects of the online community. I can’t count the amount of times I have been told to go kill myself or insulted in a thousand varied and often offensive ways.

A lot of people don’t see the point of chatrooms of talking to strangers from strange lands or whatever. The appeal of chatrooms can be the anonymity of it all which in certain cases will allow the shy to come out of their shell a bit and talk to people who they may not have had the courage to talk to face to face, the flipside of course being that without the face to face there is no end of the hateful that some people might be tempted to say. It is a reflection of society which may well have been influenced by the growth of faceless communication chat rooms, texting and that sort of thing.

I don’t think we can blame the current state of society on chat rooms though they and the way people conduct themselves in them are merely symptoms.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

World of Warcraft - Keep on Trucking


I have been taking steps to improve the DPS of my Hunter, currently the Psuedo-main role in my host of characters. Most of my (iLvl 350) gear has been enchanted but I will freely admit that I have not yet bought one of those new pointless ebonsteel belt buckles (inflation rip off thanks very much Blizzard) but legs, boots, hands and wrists are all sorted.

I have banned myself from the Troll dungeons after no less than three kicks for low DPS (which was around 9k when I could check) but I have been going into normal Heroic Dungeons trying to tighten up my rotation. I have done the good old elitist jerk research but I think the next logical step is to invest in some sort of addon to help with all the timers as I find myself wasting chances to hit Kill Command when it comes off that cooldown either through getting to happy spamming Cobra Shot or not managing Focus properly. After a couple of days of dungeon training (which due to time constraints meant about 6 dungeon runs) I found that my DPS was improving to at least 12k sometimes more but I am not sure if that was down to boss gimmicks like that stone dragon with the wind buffs.

I have not finished with my quest for my killing power though as I am just finishing up my research on a Marksmanship spec. I have heard that it can do more DPS in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing so it is worth a try, I had some experience with it from 60-70 or so but that was pre Cata so it has been changed a lot since then.

Currently I run a Beat Mastery spec as laid down by EJ with a blank second spec. I do harbour hopes of obtaining the spirit leopard and visit Sholazar at least 3 times a week in hopes of picking him up but so far no joy.

I should also give a little time to discuss the fact that I have moved two of my characters into a new guild from Fight Club. Fight Club is just ridiculously dead and has been so since I returned from my break. My definition of dead is a 200 character guild that I have rarely see get above three people online at once even on the weekend and that is including me. 

The new guild is Forgotten Kingdoms and I decided to join on a bit of a whim, after talking to their co GM randomly through bonding over our mutual interest in the Sega Saturn. It is a level 20 guild with all those rather attractive guild perks that I have been missing at FC. Also I intend to grind out the rep to buy all the heirloom pieces for at least one armor class so that the levelling process is as painless as possible (note to self at 1200 a pop I might want to work on my gold reserves which are down to 25k eek!). Before I transferred over the characters, level 85 hunter and level 83 shadow priest I got them both the 100% guild tabards to aid with the reputation grind which should take some of the sting out of it in theory.