the update.

It’s been a while since I wrote something here, I’ve just been out living it, really. Guild happenings have been… happening and at the end of each day I’ve been too tired to do anything but log out and take my sleepy head to bed. But it’s all been goin’ on! Team Angels have been moving up in the world, getting enough regular and geared-up people around to set some kind of basic Karazhan raiding plan that people actually turn up for with the extra incentive of a fledgling DKP system beginning to unfurl it’s tiny wings to ensure, hopefully, that it stays that way.

It’s early days at the moment so we’re relying on regular rolls to the master looter for drops, but people get a point for signing up to the raid ahead of time and then turning up, a point for each hour spent in the raid, and two points for a boss kill. It may take a while to set in, but dammit if we don’t get people actually doing their bit for the progress of the guild, even if it’s just reading the GMotD once a day. We don’t ask much.

I have a guild tip also! Guildies have been coming online and not reading the message of the day (which, granted, Blizzard don’t make it easy by printing the message and then scrolling it out of view with all manner of “Joined Channel:” messages, but still) and asking out of interest what the daily heroic quest is. So I’ve started putting the daily heroic dungeon in the message and then no-one has an excuse. Someone asks what it is, they’re banged to rights! Point them in the direction of what would take, at best, five seconds to check when they first entered the world and someday they might think to do it out of habit. Psh. People. What are you going to do with them?

There’s also been talk of using Ventrillo but I have my reservations, first and foremost being that I broke the microphone socket on my computer. Oh yeah, I have the mic still all set up, stuck to the underside of the shelf above my monitor and positioned to allow casual chat whilst even reclined back without need for fiddly headsets that only seem to give me Hot Ear. This dates back to my pre-WoW days of playing Scrabble online and wanting to keep a conversation with a distant friend over gTalk going at the same time, but an ill-advised tidying up excursion made sure it got yanked a little too hard in the direction that such sockets don’t like to be yanked. Now it crackles. Incessantly.

Secondly, won’t somebody please think of the magic of WoW? A level 70 night elf rogue might look all bad-ass in his gear and turn out some considerable damage to match, but when suddenly he speaks with a faux-bad ass voice of a squeaky thirteen-year-old overdosed on his own misguided sense of machismo, that magic shatters. I’ve seen how certain players regard themselves over the city channels, I do not want that in my ears.

Thirdly, I like to have gentle music playing while I’m at work. Nothing too loud, nothing too vocal, Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 worked well in tests during the last Karazhan party. Stuff like that. Mogwai, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, perhaps even Sigur Rós or The Orb at the weekends or when it gets late. Keeps me calm, it does. Helps me to keep my head while making sure that all around the bosses are losing theirs. That’ll be gone won’t it?

No, voice chat wouldn’t work for me. Voice chat is for amateurs. Not going there. Uh-huh. Nope.