I was super-duper lucky to nab an [Orb of Sin'dorei] from Magister’s Terrace this week, giving me the ability to turn into a pretty, ginger-haired Blood Elf Druid for 5 minutes out of every 30. (And thanks to afore-mentioned Ghost Pulse addon, I never miss the timer!) Unfortunately, this means I don’t use Tree of Life for that period of time, which deprives me of a certain someone’s beautiful shapeshift skins. On a related note, MMO Champion is reporting that several modified Zhevra mount skins have been added to the game on the PTR. Maybe it’s not very patriotic, but I’d love to trade in my [Reins of the Frostsaber] for one!
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been sort of quiet the past couple of weeks. While I’ve worked hard to keep up with comments and e-mails, between projects at work and a three-day vacation in Las Vegas where I forgot to bring blogging materials, I haven’t had much time to devote to the blog. I’m hoping things will settle down soon, though, as I have a lot of things I am looking forward to sharing with you, including some great community-based submissions, mailbag responses, and — of course — some math and analysis. But first, I’d like to update you all on some exciting news (both for me and my guild)!
Recently, I was offered the newly-created position of Healer officer for my guild, Aegis Hestia. Rather than class officers (which have always seemed too cumbersome and inefficient for those classes with diverse specs), our guild has added role officers for Healing, Ranged DPS, Melee DPS, and Tanking. I had previously been convinced that I wouldn’t like to be an officer because I feel that officers should be able to lead raids. However, this role-specific position is one that I feel well-suited to handle, so I decided to accept. Although it was only officially announced tonight, I’ve been serving in this capacity for the past week, sort of getting my feet wet and making sure it’s something I enjoy. It’s been a challenge, particularly setting up healing assignments for encounters new to our guild. (The addon HealOrganizer has been indispensable in this regard.) And while learning about all these new fights for the purposes of setting up healing assignments is providing me invaluable post-fodder, it’s also caused my healing output during trash to suffer. Then again, trash is really just Chain Heal fodder, right? 
Aegis Hestia also just welcomed a group of well-equipped, experienced level 70s from another guild who recently folded up shop. They’re great people, including a really nice Resto Druid (/wave Hadon), and we’re very fortunate to have picked them up. Their guild was at around the same place progression-wise as Aegis but a little further. Since adding them, we’ve killed Fathom-Lord Karathress and High Astromancer Solarian for the first time. I know, I know. We’d be uber … if this were last year. 
All this new-found raiding success has brought with it the spoils of war, and I’ve been the lucky recipient of several amazing new upgrades which I won’t list here, mostly because I know I skip those sorts of posts. I was particularly excited about one particular item, though. I finally picked up a [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] earlier this month and, from my work with the Mana Regeneration Calculator, swapped it in to replace my well-used [Bangle of Endless Blessings]. NOM NOM NOM MANA NOM NOM. (”NOM” is ostensibly the sound an animal — generally one considered to be cute or even cutely ferocious — makes when it’s eating something with great vigor.)
On a real life but still Druid-related note, I found a pair of kickass gold leaf earrings at the mall this weekend. And by “gold leaf” I mean “leaves of metal that is gold in color but not molecular substance which I cannot afford” not “covered in a fine foil of gold.” I think they’re +12 Spirit or something. Some Priest next to me made to nab them before I could, but I pointed out that they were clearly class-specific. Then I cast Moonfire on her. =)
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Well, I’m back after what feels like a month long vacation (or maybe that was just the 11 hour ride home from Los Angeles). We had a wonderful, wonderful time, and I can’t say enough great things about Carnival. Cruise vacations can be a tremendous value, especially if you don’t have your heart set on a room with a view. Following Bellwether’s recent examples, here are a few of my favorite pictures from our trip:
I had originally intended on bringing research materials so I could work on a few articles for the site while I was away. Unfortunately, excessive indulgence in wine (21 bottles between the four of us) and Mexican tequila made this all but impossible. Nonetheless, I am working on a new series of articles related to the changes to mana regeneration coming in 2.4, something I’m very excited to share.
Because we were paying for Internet time by the minute and Valenna and I were sharing a little over 55 minutes, I didn’t have much time for surfing. What little time I did have was spent reading (but not responding to) e-mails and comments, doing some administrative stuff over at Blog Azeroth and watching my Google Reader unread item totals climb at an alarming rate. In fact, when I opened my reader this morning I was greeted by the following horrors:
I mostly skimmed subject lines, read the ones that sounded especially interesting (including all of your posts, of course), and guiltily clicked the "Mark all as Read" button. Ahhhh … much better! Restoration Druids have understandably been in a tizzy over the recently announced nerf to the Lifebloom coefficient, and Leafshine has put together a web log campaign for those interested in showing their support. For my part, I’ve been trying very hard to stay upbeat. It helps that I have mostly stopped PvPing and so am generally unaffected by most of the ridiculously overboard nerfs to the spec coming in 2.4. The Lifebloom nerf has been hard to swallow, though, especially in light of some of the improvements being given to other classes.
Anyway, while I loved our vacation, I’m relieved to be home and back at the Compose Draft screen. Please be a little patient as I catch up on comments and e-mails over the next few days!
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Another non-Tanking related post…hopefully that’s okay…
What goes into the selection of a character, their race and gender, their class and appearance? Like anything, I feel this is intensely personal. Regardless of why you picked what you did, your selection says something about you, even if it isn’t what you or others might think.
Some decisions are highly interdependent such as the fact that there are certain classes for each faction that only have one available race. Perhaps conversely, your class was selected after you picked your race and you just picked what looked fun from the available choices.
Despite the severely limited character design options of World of Warcraft, each player still has a lot of things to consider when selecting what to play. What role, what faction, what sort of gameplay does one enjoy?
One thing that crops up again and again, independent of the other decisions above which are widely viewed as legitimate design choices, is the furor over cross-gender characters. Without getting into the virtues and oft-claimed vices of such a choice, I do wonder why we do these things.
According to Warcraft Realms census page, the most popular races are also arguably the most humanocentric ones with Humans, Night Elves, Blood Elves, and Undead topping the charts as the races with double digit percentages of the character population from 10-70 across all servers.
A number of reasons could be in play here and likely are. I’m no socio-cultural anthropologist nor am I sure that’s really what you’d need to be to make educated assumptions on this topic, but there are a few reasons that jump out at me, the layperson.
Remember that the bulk of this comes from completely unscientific anecdotal evidence, conjecture, and other spurious points of origin.
Perhaps the most important thing that occurs to me is a certain level of identity. I assume that the popularity of the more humanocentric races is a direct result of identity psychology. Most people identify well with these sorts of characters, making it easier to invest in them and their success.
But the level of literal identification with a race is highly subjective as elves and zombies aren’t exactly like anything extant in the world we inhabit offline, at least not in the forms presented. Additionally, the male humans are ridiculously muscular even when casters and the females have some odd shapes themselves. So while one can identify more readily with one of these 4 most popular races, there is still a high degree of separation from what we know.
Concessions are made for the fantasy. Beautiful, muscular, artful characters that are both more and less than we are become the front for our interaction in the lands of Azeroth, providing a certain level of anthropomorphism that make the characters both alien and accessible, appealing and inoffensive.
But some of the same logic can be applied to the highly inhuman races (if any such actually exist in the game…which is arguable). While the level of popularity of the familiar speaks to the desire to identify, those that select the inhuman could be said to be looking for a degree of separation.
Tusked elven neanderthals, ridiculously diminutive gnomes, bovine tribes and hooved aliens all provide a degree of distance that makes it easy to view the character as separate from the player. Without assuming that the players of humans and elves are looking to play themselves (though some claim they are), those that select these other less-human races seem to be looking to up the fantasy quotient of their game, to find something truly different to immerse themselves in.
Inevitably, we come to the selection of gender. Highly controversial is the decision to pick a gender that isn’t your own.
Like race, the selection of gender reflects a degree of identification, though the motivating factors are somewhat different.
I won’t touch on others’ decisions, but discuss my own.
My main character is a Female Night Elf Druid.
My friends were and are primarily Alliance players. As such, when I went to make my Druid, my selection was restricted to Night Elves. I’m not averse to them however, and at the time humans were my preferred Alliance race. From this, I think I wanted somethign relatively close to home, something I could identify with.
So while I had no choice in the selection of my character’s race, I was prone to such a selection anyway due to my desire to have a degree of familiarity present in the character.
But when I went to pick the gender of my character, I unthinkingly selected a female. As most of my readers have surmised, I’m male. My primary character (and most of the others I play, for that matter) is female.
Why did I do that? Is it because I want to be a girl? Am I homosexual as so many detractors would claim? Am I a pervert, an extortionist, sexually repressed? Well, none of the above (okay, I might be a bit of a pervert ;P ).
I don’t think it’s any of the above, but I’ll leave it to you to decide what you think for yourself.
First, though, I think I wanted some distance. Night Elves are, despite being elves, still largely human in appearance. Certainly they have many alien characteristics that set them apart, and in fact I’d argue that they’re really no less alien than say a Troll or Orc, but they have strong appeal to people that want an attractive human-like character. Because they’re still largely human-like, the most distance I could get was to make the character female.
It helped that I found the male Night Elf to border on ridiculously stupid-looking, but lets face it, the females have their own proportion issues and sometimes I think they look like really tall monkeys. Still, clicking female was remarkably easy.
But I don’t identify myself with my character. I don’t look at her and think, “Me.” Okay, maybe a little, but by making her female I could more easily be different from my character whereas a male one might have run a tad too close to being “Me” in digital form.
Playing a female doesn’t feel weird to me but neither does it feel overtly distant. She’s me, but she isn’t remotely me. That doesn’t make any sense, but I can’t articulate it any better than I am. There are parts of her that ring in strong identification and parts of her that are very alien and definitively not like me.
Finally, there’s the part that might scuttle my claims of feminist sympathies: I care about her more than I care about my male characters.
My male characters are almost wholly disposable. I don’t give two rats’ toes what happens to them. It’s a game and nothing permanent really happens to any of them beyond deletion, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
The female characters, Currant in particular, are like little digital friends (no, not THAT kind, fellow pervert!). Does that make me a freak? Maybe. Okay. Regardless, I want to take care of them, make them better, and do things that people say girls can’t do with them.
See, whenever I make a face-hitter, I think it’d be cool for it to be female because in our world, that sort of thing is uncommon and in many cases frowned upon. I like strong women. I like capable independent women and this satisfies that predilection. I like it when women do things people say they can’t or shouldn’t do. Female warriors are a thing with me, I suppose.
I married a proverbial tomboy, in point of fact.
On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to make a super-testosterone-laden male into a caster, so they end up female, too. It snaps my disbelief suspenders for some irrational reason to think of men built like the humans and elves and orcs of Warcraft being magical bookworms. They’re more like magical beefcakes with faces that have been smashed in by a panful of fried steroids. I don’t mind other people playing them but I can’t bring myself to do it.
That said, I’m really enjoying a Troll Rogue and Undead Priest right now, both male. Is it the separation of race, the distance in identity that makes it possible? I’m not positive, but I find the thought intriguing. Perhaps making them male makes them just accessible enough to play an alien race, much as making an elf or human character female provides just the right amount of separation for me.
I recognize the cultural impact on my view of gender and how it’s influencing what I play and I’m not making any excuses. I like strong women. I’m a bit nervous throwing my personal process out here like this, but I’m curious about this, about how each of us decide what to play from those who just click random everything and go, to those that agonize over every detail; from those who want something completely apart from themselves to those who are looking for a virtual version of themselves to turn into a fantasy hero…and everything in between.
So even if you play a human of the same gender as yourself, or an idealized elf of your gender, think about why you really made that decision and what it says about you, to you. Don’t concern yourself with what other people think, consider how your sense of identity factors into the characters you play. You might surprise yourself.
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Sorry for the lack of updates of late. We had an out-of-town guest over the weekend, and my limited free time has been devoted to working on a new guild site for Aegis Hestia.
My guild uses Joomla, a PHP-based content management system which has upsides (it’s free, and there are a lot of plugins for it) and its downsides (I’m a VB.NET developer and don’t have experience with PHP). Our current site has been misbehaving for some time so our guild leader decided on a fresh install. I was reluctant to help out at first, having previously devoted so much time to designing and maintaining the existing site, but was eventually won over by the idea of something new and fresh (and working). It helps that several of our guild officers have chipped in to help move over important information.
To avoid getting overwhelmed and having the project take up more time than I can afford, I clearly outlined my goals for the new site.
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- Unlike last time, I didn’t want to spend a tremendous amount of time doing design work. I found a Joomla theme that was both clean and generic (and free). It looks great right out the box, and I figure I can customize it as time goes on so that I don’t have to make a large time investment upfront.
- The current site uses a menu plugin called “transmenu” that allows us to have dropdown menus. I went a little further with this than maybe I should have and the result was that it’s harder than it should be to find important links (like the Guild Application). For the new site, I made sure that it’s much easier to find the “Apply to AH!” by making it a primary menu item (rather than nesting it under “Guild Information”).
- We presently use SimpleMachines forums, a set of forums that weren’t built for Joomla and had to be integrated using a plugin called a “bridge” so that the two can talk to each other. The solution has always been imperfect, however. Luckily, this time around Joomla had a great set of forums called FireBoard which are designed to be entirely integrated with the Joomla framework. This in and of itself was a huge selling point for me when deciding whether or not I wanted to help develop the new site.
- While I like the design of our current site, I feel it mispresents the atmosphere of Aegis Hestia. Its subdued colors (purple and gray) and the piece of fantasy art I selected make us seem stolid and boring. This time around, I wanted to do something more fun, so I’ve been working on a banner that features several of our core raiders interacting with one another. Here’s a preview of what I’ve done so far:
I’ve incorporated several inside jokes to please the membership:
- Two of my friends Sabelyna and Marreyn play a Warlock and a Mage respectively. They’re shown at the far left side of the banner. Marreyn is lecturing Sabelyna on something, probably telling her to use Lifetap instead of asking her for water. The small black cat asleep on the ground next to Sabelyna is one I gave her a few weeks ago.
- Our guild leader Devilcs plays a Gnome Warrior. This by itself is pretty humorous so I depicted him flexing to demonstrate his strength. One of our officers, Kaimeline, stands behind him laughing at this display of machismo. Devil is also obsessed with having the skull icon on at all times during raids, so I included that symbol over his head. This has the added benefit of drawing attention to him as the guild leader.
- I’m known to have a few glasses of wine during raids, especially for content we’re farming. As such, I depicted myself admiring a glass of wine.
- Antipas plays a Human Warrior who has jokingly asked that he be allowed to bid “sexy” (rather than “need” or “want”) on items that he thinks would look good on his character. He’s shown in an open-chested red shirt and the closest thing I could find to black silk boxers doing the “crotch thrust” portion of the Human Male dance.
- Raliah plays a female Gnome Rogue and is one of the most beloved members of the guild. Always willing to lend a hand to those in need and an unusually active raider, Raliah is probably the closest thing we have to a guild mascot. She also really enjoys fishing so I’ve depicted her in ninja-like clothes stealthing around and carrying a fish. If she ever manages to acquire a Mr. Pinchy pet, I’ll definitely have to add him!
- Niade plays a Shadow Priest very well. I’ve shown her in as close a representation of Shadow Form as I could, using the Priest spell Levitate to hover like a ghost.
- Lutgehr is an outspoken Dwarf who frequently expresses his distaste for Elves in general and guys playing Female Night Elves in particular. I’ve illustrated him pinching the furry bottom of one of our Feral tanks, Currant.
- My husband plays both a Human Warrior and a Gnome Mage. While his Warrior can take a hit, his Mage definitely can’t and this concept is something he seems to struggle with, dying every pull on the way to Gruul. He’s shown dead in the banner, having been turned into so much Gnome-colored paste by some baddie or another. My friend Valenna who is known to ridicule him for his carelessness is shown kneeling over him with a smile on her face.
- Painmaiden plays a Night Elf Hunter and is one of the people I recently met face to face at a guild gathering. In game, he’s both friendly and skilled. He’s also one of the more talkative members on voice chat, making raids that much more enjoyable when he’s present. Meeting him face-to-face, however, revealed something else about him. He’s a bit of a cowboy, with a 10-gallon hat and boots to match. I’ve shown his character Painmaiden in the hat closest resembling a cowboy hat, brown leather boots, and overalls.
As time goes on, I intend to add additional guild members to the banner — probably giving preference to active raiders — perhaps as a way of “earning ones stripes.” The current banner has fourteen people in it, and I suspect there’s room for another 20 or so.
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Several of our guild members have blogs like this one (Druid Tank, More than Plate Wearing Priests, Parry, Dodge, Spin, Resto4Now, and Survival FTW) so I wanted to make these guild-generated resources accessible to our membership. I’ve included a few of the blogs’ RSS feeds in the right column, highlighting the 3 most recent articles. I plan to eventually add them all once I have the authors’ permissions.
So far I’m really enjoying the work on the new guild site. I hope to have it up and running within the next few days so that it doesn’t occupy so much of my free time, however, until then, I’m afraid that my post rate will be lessened.
