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.

Out to get me.

I'm having a difficult time acclimating into the world at the moment. I am a fairly naive person, in that I assume that most people are truly good at heart and will treat other people in their lives with respect and dignity. This is easy for me to understand and accept.

Where it breaks down is when people are kind or nice to me as a person. I almost immediately begin analyzing the interactions for malice, or looking for devious intentions.

My Beef with eHarmony

I am sorry if this whole post comes across as bitter. I am enjoying the process of eHarmony for what it is worth, but there are some very glaring problems I see with this way of dating.

So, I've been subscribed to eHarmony for about 6 months; I signed up after my previous relationship ended, and I was looking for a way to alleviate the loneliness I was feeling at the time. I admit, it was probably not the best thing for me to do at that moment, but I was looking for a way to ease my way back into the scene and it seemed like a great way to meet people. So one late night (probably after a few beers) I took the personality test, and figured what the hell, let me sign up for a year and see what happens.

Let me say up front that eHarmony is not a great way to meet people. I have had various degrees of success with the model. I dated someone seriously during some of my tenure, I have sent numerous message requests, gone through the hand holding "guided communication" and had entire email conversations with people that eventually evaporate. There are artificial barriers up all over the place that actually prevent potential matches from communicating with each other, rather than getting people together. My main gripe is that by the time two people jump through all the hoops and stages of communication, reading reports on their personality, and speaking in messages, there is very little left to talk about between the two people; all the potential small talk has been smothered out of the equation. It is almost like I saw how the sausage was made before actually trying it.

One thing that differentiates eHarmony from other dating websites is the 29 dimensions of compatibility system that you are matched with other people. The matching system sends you several people per day that the system has matched you up with based on the personality profile you completed. After about 6 months, at a rate of ~6 matches a day, I now am matched with 340 women. I looked at that number one day, and thought "Wow this is depressing. There are 340 people that either I don't find particularly interesting or attractive, or they don't feel that way about me; either I am being way too picky, or there is something really putting off about my profile." I think self consciousness always sets in before rational thought, but now that I think about it, I am pretty sure the matching system isn't as good as they advertise.

When you set up your profile, you can setup a profile of likes/dislikes as well called "Something to Talk About." These are things like, what sports do you follow, what kind of music do you like, are you a dog/cat person etc. This profile is just the little goofy things that everyone likes/dislikes; It resembles a mini profile of you. What bothers me is that the system will match me with someone, and most of my matches will have zero or few matches in this mini profile. I would assume that if the system is matching me on 29 dimensions of my personality, almost every profile would have at least some of these little things line up as well.

The website also makes you choose your "Must Haves/Can't Stands" so that you can communicate to people you are matched with the things that you are unwilling to compromise with. I like this idea in theory, but I come across people that I start communicating with and as soon as I read their list and compare it with mine, I wonder why I was matched up with this other person in the first place. Is the model wrong? Is the model comparing or measuring the wrong things?

In fact, every other profile starts to look like a cookie cutter of the last one after a while. After looking at all the profiles I have seen, I can predict what the next girls are going to say: I love my friends and family, I am grateful for all the opportunities I have had in my life, and I want to meet someone who I can laugh with. It is starting to sound like these girls are writing to Santa. I think it has to do with the personality test that they give everyone to begin. You answer about a half hour's worth of questions and almost feel sedated at the end of it, so by then you brain can't really produce anything unique or expressive about who you are. Ok, maybe there is some hyperbole in there, but there also may be a kernel of truth.

There are some things that the website does pretty well. It is great at being a non-threatening place where singles can let a computer program take some of the burden off their shoulders in terms of looking for a date; however getting you in contact with another person is not one of those things that it does all that well. In fact I would argue that it does the opposite. I don't think that eHarmony has a real incentive to match people up with each other. They are a business after all. One of their motivations must be to make money at some point in the process. After 6 months in the system, it feels more like a trap than a place where I am supposed to be meeting others. Here are a few reasons why:

1) The system finds people for you, rather that letting you search out and filter people based on what you are looking for. This seems counter-intuitive to me.

2) The system delivers you a few new matches at a time, which keeps you coming back to the website every day, or at least frequently. It also delivers new people to you even though you may be getting to know someone, which could make you think the grass is greener somewhere if your current match starts to lose his sparkle.

3) The guided communication is actually a barrier to communication. It is fun the first few times to send lists with checkboxes back and forth the first few times. After you have been through it enough though, it get very tedious and starts to feel like jumping through hoops.

4) It is expensive. It can be argued that the cost of the service keeps it for people who are serious about finding a relationship, and keeps the lurkers out. I think that is very true, but it does cost much more than other services.

I would argue that the website has an incentive to keep you coming back to the website, impede the communication between people, and not allow you to browse and search the other people in the database, simply because it keeps you subscribed to the service and paying a monthly fee. Neil Clark Warren aint cheap.

Did Cataclysm shoot itself in the foot?

My spider sense is tingling lately about this expansion so far, and it boils down to the spectrum of difficulty in all of the content. It's not that the content is really hard, but that a LOT of the content is hard, and there is not much that one can coast and have some mindless fun.

My hat goes off to Blizzard. They did everything they said they would. There are no face roll player rotations anymore, heroic dungeons require a lot of attention (at least on the first few times through), raids are tuned and balanced (with some glaring exceptions on 10man) and the world and the stories are told where every zone is a nice complete package.

I was very excited going into this expansion. Things are going to be difficult again, things are going to be challenging I told myself. 10man and 25man are going to be equal progression paths, and I can lead a 10man with much less headache than I led our 25man in ICC. It's going to be great! I won't be a stressed wreck raid leader, and I am going to have a lot of fun!

While I am having fun with the raiders that I play with, I am already tired out by the raiding content. I am tired out given I am continuously recruiting replacements for raiders that flake. I am tired out by hotfixes and changes to classes and encounters that need to be relearned regularly. I am tired out by my complex rotation that I have to theorycraft and change when patches hit (I'm looking at you Holy Power CS/HOTR fuckery); compounding the problem is learning my new game pad which I specifically bought to combat the lack of real estate for all the new goddamn buttons that I have to push not just for my main spec, but for my offspec and my shaman's main and offspec. I'm tired of feeling like an inadequate raid leader when other guilds progress faster than we do, and I am tired of letting down my raiders when I fail.

So what changed? Why does this, the introductory tier of raiding, feel insurmountable? I think is has to do with the spectrum of difficulty in comparison to previous introductory tiers. In Vanilla and TBC, there was a LONG "training" you had to go through (leveling up) to get into dungeons and raiding and it was learned ad-hoc based on who you happened to come across in the "Looking for Group" chat. You have new abilities to learn and integrate, but the learning curve was pretty slow. I remember it taking months before I could call myself ready to step into a Karazhan.

Wrath took a little quicker pace. The leveling time was quicker than TBC, everyone got shiny new toys, learned how to use them and then jumped into raids. Rotations were more complex than TBC, but that was buffered by the ease of the first tier or raiding. A player could learn and hone their skills in an actual raid environment while getting that sense of fun and achievement.

I think where the breakdown for me is that Cataclysm is challenging for me on all fronts. Everyone got shiny new toys, and we got shot up the express lane to 85, reducing the time to acclimate to all the new hotness. Raiding has become juggling a 5+ button rotation/priority system, while managing your resources, while paying attention to boss mechanics and moving out of the bad. It is not that those things individually are terribly difficult, but doing them all at the same time is exhausting, not to mention the addictive nature of content progression "Oh grats everyone we killed that boss, now we learn the next boss".

I'm not sure what this means for the game as a whole. I'm not sure this translates to fun for the average player. If I am frustrated right now, I am not sure what this means for people that used to faceroll to loot.

I am having fun playing with my friends. I'm not sure I am having more fun raiding.