Venting

Right now Basek is getting on my nerves. I have the feeling that he doesn’t want me to raid with the 25man team in any capacity. It seems like he doesn’t want to bring me in as a backup, even on farm nights, and I have asked a couple times to do farm content with the guild and I have gotten no for an answer. Maybe I am asking too much from the guild to raid with the main team if I don’t have the time to dedicate to being a full time raider. I will talk to him and see if there is some sort of miscommunication.
He is very optimistic and charismatic, and also doesn’t take any shit from anyone. It seems to me he is much more of a cheerleader raid leader than I am accustomed to, but I think he is getting the job done.

Big Crits is currently working on heroic Ragnaros, and he and I disagree whether the guild could have downed him without the most recent nerfs on the boss. While I agree that we have a stronger raiding team than ever before, I doubt that we have enough raid comp flexibility and kill Ragnaros as it was designed initially. There are guilds out there who are more skilled than ours, who have been 6/7 since the beginning of August, and who still haven’t killed H-Rag yet. Unless Big Crits wants to bash its’ face in on a boss for 3+ months before killing it, I think that the nerfed version would be a better use of its time and not getting burned out on the game. Sure Basek doesn’t care either way, but attrition will set in and we will lose players to getting burned out or going to more progressed guilds; recruiting will get harder, and ultimately the guild will be weaker so that he can get that pre nerf satisfaction.

For that matter, neither of us have a choice in the matter, the nerfbat has hit, and none of us have control over it. Back in Sunwell, my old guild spent about a solid month and a half on Muru, and while it was satisfying to kill, nobody cares that we did that after all this time. It’s nice in my mind, and I can brag about it to people who are long time players, but ultimately I would have rather been 6/6 than beating my face against that fuckhead. Nobody will care if Big Crits killed a pre nerf Rag even 6 months from now, because the player base has the attention span of a gnat.

Snoz has been a big help to the guild in terms of recruiting and financing, and he is a lovable asshole, except when he is being an asshole to you. He keeps poking me that my 10man never got heroic Alakir. To that I say, his group was cherrypicked from the 25man team (mine wasn’t) and his group had 10 raiders that knew how to not fuck up phase 1 (mine didn’t).

Our 10man spent way too much time in phase 1 because we had a healer that continuously died to lightning, and the healers couldn’t keep up in Phase 2 in general. Snoz’s group had 2 shadow priests where our group had none, and due to the damage stacking buff with the healing done by vampiric embrace, this really provides a lot of raid healing to the group so that you can push the fight further. They also had Rationality who was hands down the best healer in the guild. For all I care, Snoz can shove his four winds title up his ass, I got mine first anyways.

The Zen of Dating

I recently read a short primer on Zen and the theory, and I think it shed some light on how the world works a little bit. From what I understand, one becomes enlightened via meditation and disconnecting your mind from thinking about the answer to your question. Instead of reaching the answer from logic, deduction and reaching for external assistance, one turns the eye inward and reaching that outward answer via introspection. I think some of these concepts can be applied to dating.

Dating 101
Let me say from the start that dating sucks. For the most part, the act of putting yourself out there for other people to window shop, judge, critique, and nitpick whether you are worthy of their time can be a fruitless activity. Dating does have its potential upside (otherwise we wouldn't do it), but there is a lot of downside to go with it. Granted it does go both ways and you are continuously on the lookout for a higher number on the 1-10 scale.

Online dating in general I think is a pretty treacherous place. There are many unspoken rules, and every person has their own expectations and preconceived notions of how they expect things to happen. The thing with online dating is that it's becoming a more commonly accepted avenue of meeting people, so the pool of participants is growing; I'm not sure the pool of participants has the potential for shrinking anytime soon though.

It's a game. Dating is a game, and people want to win. All the players will naturally want to catch the biggest fish possible, and because of this the most attractive (physical, career, personality, potential) participants will get the most attention from the people in the dating pool, while the least attractive people will get barely any attention at all. It's kind of a vicious system, but I think that's life. This imbalance exists in many facets of life, but the online environment lowers the barriers of communication and reduces the social friction of approaching a potential date.

There is another dimension of attractiveness that is very intriguing, and it is very subjective. It seems to me at least that those who are the most eager to date and put the most energy into dating or starting a new relationship are the people who are the least likely to succeed. They are trying too hard, and end up having the least amount of success. I'm definitely guilty of this with a couple girls that I date. This may just be an indicator of how lots of different people behave, but I think there is some human aversion to others that overextend themselves.

My Dating Reflections
The last year has been unfulfilling for the most part. After my breakup with Erin, I waited a few months and then decided I was ready to get back out there and meet girls. Mostly this was because of loneliness, and I missed having someone else in my life. Looking back, this was not the best thing to do at the time; I am just now coming to terms with the breakup about a year later and being able to accept it and move past it .

Over the course of the year, I think I talked to dozens of women and went on countless dates but all I have to show for it are a few girls that I actually connected with. These girls were people that could be myself around, enjoyed their company, and were physically attracted to. I think it was these girls that I learned the most from, but in the end I learned something new from everyone that I spent time with.

Things I learned. Don't rush, love grows as people become closer; if you are forcing it, you are doing it wrong. Be true to yourself first; you are useless to a potential partner if you don't know how to be content without someone else. If you are doing all the leg work, and clearing your schedule for someone else, they probably aren't that into you or just like the attention. Don't assume you are the only person they are seeing, especially if you are seeing multiple people as well. Get outside your comfort zone once in a while, you will probably meet some interesting people.

The dating process has been more of a self education and introspection rather than bearing fruit for meeting someone else. Like I said, it has the potential of meeting someone who is awesome and knocks your socks off is always present, but I think nature of the system becomes an exercise in game theory; why commit to something when you can roll the dice one more time and see what else may come. While I may not have a woman to show for it, I think I have come out of the process a better person, and it was a lesson in catharsis.

The Online Dating Model
I said before that online dating is growing and becoming the new standard for finding the man or woman of your dreams. This may or may not be true, but I am of the opinion that the trend is that if there is something that can be improved by adding an online component, it is generally done and adds an efficiency to it. Whether the efficiency benefits the operators or the users is up for debate. It's a useful tool, but I think it becomes a crutch for the average John or Jane that is looking for that special someone. For the dating sites, it is of more benefit to get you to keep paying a subscription to that system, than to lose two customers who fall in love. That's probably a little heavy handed and cynical, but it seems plausible.

From my experience, a computer or some algorithm matches people based on similarities in personality and what their expectations are for a mate. From my experience, these sites aren't terribly good. To quote Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, "They claim to use heuristic algorithms, but it may well be hokum." Over the year I used eHarmony, I would say that only about one in ten people they matched me with seemed like we would actually have any potential. This may be my mental filter hard at work, but some just seemed way off. I would argue that having access the matching criteria turns on a lot of the mental filters that we have, and a lot of people don't get a chance before you mentally discard them.

Physical attraction is paramount. If you say different, you might be kidding yourself. It doesn't matter what your profile says if the other person isn't pulled in by that initial physical attraction. As I wrote that first sentence, I heard poets and scribes from the ages calling out in pain "Love is blind!"I really wish it was, but tragically we are human. I think it is beautiful when emotional chemistry and compatibility transcends the physical, but the rest of us are initially pulled together by physical attraction. Once that connection is made, we are then poking and prodding each other and evaluating the other person on an emotional level.

I think that one fault that the online dating system suffers from is that people have too much information available to them before they decide to get to know the other person. From a glance, you can know crazy amount about that person even before you decide to get in touch with them and see if the dating potential is there. This coupled with the sheer amount of people in the system makes the snap judgment a very effective tool. Maybe too effective.

Having too much information also makes getting to know that person a little awkward. Based on what the other person put out there, you most likely know where they are from, brothers and sisters, what they do for work, how much they make, if they want to have kids, and a whole slew of other things. Granted the other person isn't going to quiz you on what you put in your profile (and if they do, run fast and run far) but I think there is more value in the process of discovering these things rather than the information itself. This is one situation where I would say less is definitely more.

Dating might be a necessary evil though. While you play a game that may or may not favor you, I think it is important for people to date. You might hit the jackpot on the very first slot machine pull, or it might take you a few different machines to get the payoff, but I think the process is important. It builds character. Through meeting people and potential mates, you learn a lot about the world you live in, and you also learn about yourself. Spending time around people and situations that are unfamiliar helps you grow as a person, and as an extra bonus there is someone right there with you whom you are sharing the experience with; the bonus is that they might decide to keep you.

Ten Man Raiding: A Post-Mortem

After raid leading 25mans during Wrath, I decided to see how the 10man side of progression raiding would measure up to what I thought was the more stressful and chaotic 25man side of things. While it lived up to my expectations in some areas, 10man progression raiding underperformed drastically in some areas. Would I call it a win or a loss? I’d call it a wash. Both models have their warts, but as long as the Internet exists, there will be people from both camps lobbing grenades at each other. Let’s dive in.

The Good:
- Easier to assemble.
So you decided you want to raid, or want to put together a raiding team. Depending on how many friends you have (who play wow, know what raiding is, and aren’t that bad at the game and/or how many people you can pull from trade chat or the realm forums) odds are pulling 9 other people together is always easier to manage than 24. I still applaud this decision made back in Wrath.

- Less Loot
Less loot is a good thing? Whaaaaa? Loot drama all but disappears when there are only 1-2 people in the raid that can use a given item. Trinkets are still a wild card, as are tier tokens, but generally everyone stays pretty happy. Less loot = less complex loot systems, and all the crazy DKP variants are sort of redundant.

- Geometry
Need to spread out? There is an ENORMOUS space for you to do so. Generally spread out mechanics are trivialized by 10man raiding, but to be fair 25man raids pull someone back from the brink if “that guy” messes up a spread out mechanic. I’m still giving this one to the 10mans.

- Less downtime
From my experience there is far less time spend on raid chatter, and wipe recovery is a lot quicker when there are less people to manage. I think everyone does a lot more self-policing when the anonymity factor goes away. You are more accountable to the people around you because you have a much bigger effect on the success of the raid.

- Everyone’s voice gets heard.
Since the sea of voices is diminished, you might hear from people who don’t normally speak up and offer useful advice. As a raid leader, you will probably get a good perspective from other points of view during an encounter, and parsing the useful advice gets a little easier.

The Bad:
- Everyone’s voice gets heard…
As long as there are more than two people in close proximity, someone is going to have an opinion about something else. Raiding is no exception. There is less inertia for people to have their voices heard, and people are also going to take advantage of that and speak to an audience.

- Less Loot
Another double edged sword. While the boss does drop loot that is pretty much tailored for 1-2 specs, the boss loot tables are so big, that getting 2-3 pieces from a 15 item table can create a lot of problems and if you are really unlucky, you may never end up getting that piece that you want. 25mans get to sample the loot table more times, so there is a greater chance that something you want will drop even though the loot/raider ratio is the same.

- Fighting the raid buff boss
It becomes very difficult to balance a raid group and making sure that you have all the raid buffs possible, which will help your chances of success dramatically. Given the ridiculous amount of buffs/debuffs/auras there are available, all I can say is that I hope you have a hunter and a shaman to fill in the gaps. We ran for the longest time without the 3% damage buff in the raid, and while I am sure it didn’t make that much difference, it would have been a huge help. I even know some teams that ran without druids before warlocks and death knights were given battle reses. That is huge for an encounter and recovering from and RNG death.
Don’t even talk to me about raid cooldowns. 25man wins it flat out in that situation.

- One death usually means wipe.
Having one person die to an encounter means very different things when you compare the two sizes of raid. Losing 10% of your raid vs 4% of your raid is a big deal. I have raided a little bit with the Big Crits 25man team, Da Crew, as well as pugging 25man raids and you can usually limp through an encounter after losing 3-5 people. If you have a person die on 10man, the encounter is generally considered over.

- Thinner social fabric
This one I think is the most important thing. As it is much easier to form a 10man raiding team, it is equally easier to dissolve one. A 25man raiding team carries with it much more inertia with it in terms of people wanting to play together, and friendships forged. There is more team spirit and camaraderie in a 25man raid that stays together than a 10man. Another raider and I decided to quit at about the same time on our 10man team and it pretty much meant lights out for the team.

Lessons Learned:
The major drawing point for me to start 10man progression raiding was that smaller tight knit groups required less cats to herd, communication from raid leader to raider was more clear, and that the raiders would have a bigger interest in having the raid succeed. The density of raiders would be able to gel and everyone would be able to play off the other raiders’ strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately this was true, but the flaw in my plan was that turnover happens, and when it does, filling that hole becomes incredibly difficult. Tier 11 was really hard to recruit raiders for, especially given the careful class/buff/gear balance that 10mans have to take into consideration.

Ten mans also suffer from the daydream that you can have 10 and only 10 raiders, given all the other balances that need to be kept in check. Raiders want to raid, and sitting on the bench for a 10man seems like such a foreign concept. It’s not uncommon for a 25man to have a raiding roster of 35 people given people’s availability and boss encounter compositions. In retrospect, having a bigger bench would have helped tremendously. Real life happens, and when it does, it can cripple an entire raid night.

I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you are raiding 10s or 25s, but one bad apple spoils the bunch. Every raiding team has their “that guy” whether they can’t find his interrupt button, they can’t manage their sound on Atramedes, or they lack a functioning mic to warn that they just did something bad. I guess it is all relative, based on the perceptions of the rest of your raiding team; I have definitely been that guy before.

As far as the fun factor, I had a lot of fun in both environments, but I think that depends more on the people that you raid with rather than the size of the raid. To each his/her own in that regard. I hope to get back into progression raiding eventually, either with Big Crits or some yet to be found guild full of cool people. As for the moment, life is calling me in other directions.

Sometimes I hate iTunes shuffle...so much.

Why is this bothering me so much? Not iTunes, bless it's heart. She got married. Like a punch in the gut or a slap in the face. I turn on music for some solace and all it has to offer me is "You can't always get what you want" Really? That is what you have for me? Normally I don't mind the Stones, but come on.

I don't know what I want, but a little notification would have been great, even though it is none of my business. I guess you never really forget the one that broke your heart. She cheated, lied, and stonewalled her way half of our relationship.

I don't deserve any of it, not then, not now. I don't deserve feeling bad and still thinking back about her and being left with clues and mysteries about how she destroyed our relationship with another man, fooling around with one of her students, and disregarding me like a broken toy. How can you do these things and then tell someone to their face that you love them more than anything and that care for them and want them to be happy?

Why do I care? That's a legitimate question. Why can't I just be indifferent to her? I guess it really just gets my goat when people lie to me. Why can't you just tell me the truth and more importantly just be honest with yourself? She lied to me when we were together, what makes me thing she would tell me the truth that she was getting married after I left her. We sent emails occasionally, why not mention say, oh, I'm getting married.

Nobody can hide the truth, and especially not protect people from it.

Obviously you didn't want to stick around. So I learned from you.

Hard to Find

So, odds are you aren't reading this. That's probably a good thing. I don't think I would like you to see me like this. I'm a bit lost and having a hard time finding you. You sure don't want to be found very easily; I guess they are right, the chase is the best part. Hah. Yea.

I need a little help. Where are you? At least give me an indication where I can start.

You are probably hiding in a coffee shop or bookstore somewhere, but won't be there for long. You don't really tend to stay in one place. Heaven forbid, you are on the internet somewhere complacent in watching me squirm. Even if I found you, approaching you would be a tricky thing; I'm not great at first impressions, or even small talk. I don't peacock to try to get your attention, and the things I want to say can't be broken down into something very clever to say in a 20 second conversation.

I'm funny and interesting, I promise =) Oh those scars on my head? They are from growing up and playing rough sports. I'm not some frankenstein, not been in a car accident or something catastrophic. Just life.

Yea, I am nerdy, but it doesn't define me. I'm smart, but I have compassion. What am I interested in? Life mainly. Thinking about people and the world. I am reserved and sometimes like to watch things from afar, but I will try anything once. I'm not easily excited, sorry, but I am passionate about many things, and I wish they were tangible so that I could show people exactly what they were. It's hard to communicate ideas; they can only be learned or discovered, not told.

I guess I will find you when I am ready to. I hope your patience holds out.

What to do from here.

So, new job is good.

It is good to feel challenged again, and to be truly over my head in a few areas. Time management is going to save my life at this job. Once I get the hang of it, it will be nice. One thing that will take some getting used to is the hours. I expect to be traveling and working longer hours than I have typically. This might put a damper on WoW, raid leading, and will probably make dating a little rougher.

Ah, dating. The cause of and solution to all life's problems.

Ugh. I despise dating at the moment. I am doing my damnest to date as many girls as possible, but all in all I am just tired of the carousel. I tell myself that by seeing a variety of girls, I will learn about what I am looking for, and meet new cool people. Fact of the matter is, I don't want to meet new and cool people at all; being an introvert is a little of who I am, and the thought of many people makes me a little nervous. I'm ready again to meet someone who I can build something with. I miss being with someone.

It's hard. I don't feel like I am being really picky, but it just takes a certain person who feels like they understand me; and likewise. I am just very discouraged at the moment. Things tell me I just have to wait for the perfect storm to hit me and shake me to my core. It's a paradox. I don't feel like I am ready to love anyone again, and there are still wounds that haven't healed. Catharsis I suppose.

I miss Erin. She was a big part of my life, and I learned a lot about myself while I was with her. I still have dreams about her, and think about her randomly, but I know that we will never be the people that the other wants. Maybe that's why we loved each other. She will be better off with some other hopeless jerk, at least I hope. A song lyric comes to mind:

"You want your freedom? Take it.
That's what I'm counting on
I used to want you dead, but
Now I only want you gone"

I'm done thinking about her, or at least I wish I was. I want to move on, and I want to let her go out of my mind. Right now, I want another person in my life whom I can share with, and build with. I guess I can go about it one girl at a time.

10man Raiding: Loot and Legendaries

A welcome change to 10man raiding this expansion was the attempt to make the 10 and 25man raiding feel similar. In order to do this Blizzard made the decision to have each flavor of raiding drop the same quality of gear. While I really enjoy this decision, I think some improvements can be made on the system.

Currently boss loot tables are very large. Every boss has a table that is 12 items large. As a rule of thumb, the 10man bosses drop 2 items per kill, and the 25man bosses drop 5 items per kill. I understand that this is a simple ratio of players per kill getting loot this model assumes 20% of your raid will get a piece of loot per boss. Assuming that the stars align and everyone gets what they want off the boss, you raid needs to kill the five times before everyone’s main specs are taken care of. This is a fallacy and only works in an ideal world, but the world (of warcraft) is hardly ideal. Yes I am still making that joke.

The problem we are running into on our 10man heroic raids is that we seem to be getting the same items a majority of the time, or never seeing items that several people in the raid could use. I realize that the loot is based on random numbers, but I feel that the 25mans raids get a better shake at the loot table for a couple reasons:

1) Representation. Every boss has loot for most combinations of class/spec, but a 10man doesn’t necessarily have all those combinations represented. For the longest time, we did not have a person in the raid that could use mail intellect gear in our raid for their main spec. If mail int gear drops, it immediately goes to waste unless someone could use it for offspec that they would play for 1-2 encounters. Given that the 10man raids are trying to balance raid buffs with class composition and tier token distribution it can be very difficult to have all the gear that drops go to people who can use it.

2) Tier Tokens. The 10man heroic bosses that drop tokens for tier gear all drop 1 token per kill, while their 25man counterparts drop 3. Compound this with the fact that the token can take one of three flavors and the classes that use these can be imbalanced based on raid composition. We have 5 people vying for Vanq tokens (which is half our raid). the 10man suffers a disadvantage not only waiting for RNG to drop the token that your raid needs for an upgrade, but also that the 25mans receive more tokens per player on every kill. 25mans have a better variety of drops, and get more per kill.

3) Probablity. In 25mans, a raid gets to sample a bosses loot table 5 times, and conversely 10mans get to sample that same loot table twice. In any statistical measure, the more samples that you can take from a set, the more likely those samples will resemble the how that set is distributed. If every piece of loot has an equal chance of dropping from a boss, then every piece of loot should see an equal distribution in those samples. Given that the 25man raid samples takes more samples from that set, they are more likely to see all the given possibilities that that set contains in comparison to 10man raids. A 25man raid will be more likely to get gear that is designed for a certain class/spec than a 10man raid will.

With 4.2, legendaries are going to enter the picture as well. Blizzard has stated that the 10mans will have access to legendary items, but it will take them ~2-2.5 times more time to create them via whatever shape the process will take. I am guess it will be a shard/fragment type acquisition process given that is the model chosen for Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel. I am disappointed in this that the 10mans are already suffering a gear gap in relation to 25man raiding (albeit much smaller than Wrath), and this gap is going to widen in Firelands.

I guess you can take this all as just QQ, but I am proposing a few possible solutions:

1) Have 10mans drop 3 pieces of gear per boss, but the 3rd slot has the possibility of being the same as slots 1&2. 25man raids already have this feature enabled, as our 25mans have seen 3 agility staffs drop off Heroic Halfus, and 3 caster maces off Nefarian. Having a 3rd available loot drop will help the 10man sample more of the loot table than they can currently while still giving similar probability that nobody needs the extra piece and it can be sharded. Also, seeing as Firelands is going to have less bosses than the current tier, I assume that the loot tables are going to be bigger, which gives the 10man even less access to the whole table over time.

2) Remove the Conq, Vanq, Prot type from the Tier tokens. It is frustrating seeing the same type of token dropping and being used for offpsecs when there are others in the raid who still need it for their main specs. Based on how this tier of raiding has gone so far, many would argue that 10man heroic raids are more taxing on the raiders and raid comps, and the extra gear could help 10man progression catch up to 25man progression. I would also entertain tokens that were binary instead of trinary; there are 10 classes in the game now, why not just split them down the middle and make a “of the X” and “of the Y” which serve 5 classes each?

3) Normalize 10man and 25man legendary acquisition. When I read that 25man raids would be in the fast lane in terms of legendary creation, it was a slap in the face to 10man raiding. It made me think back to when Blizzard stated their intentions to remove a lot of the parity between 10man and 25man raiding, and legendary creation favoring the 25man raid negates that intention. I realize that legendaries are supposed to be rare and unique and difficult to attain, but biasing the speed at which you acquire them is a bad decision. It takes a village (or a guild, or a raid) to do something great, why not include everyone in the raid in that creation process and then impose a cooldown on how often that process can be repeated? I realize that Blizzard is trying to bottleneck legendaries so that 10man raids don’t just become fragment factories, but there are more elegant ways of doing this than just hamstringing the 10man fragment drop rate. As stated before 10mans already suffer from bad probability of getting things that they want, this just amplifies the problem.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully we can have a good discussion about alleviating this problem.