Ten Years of Everquest 2

I landed in Norrath the way a lot of girls did- because my boyfriend needed something for his group.  In my case, it was an enchanter.  Shortly after I happily turned into my boyfriend's buffbot (oh god, what was I thinking?!  Young and dumb, that's all I can say.) the guild we ran with imploded and we switched to EQ2.  Just before I got my goddamn epic.

Fucking still want that thing.

Anyway, I fell into EQ2 just after Kingdom of Sky launched, and spent the bulk of the expansion leveling and learning to play the game.  I'd heard horror stories about it over in Everquest, and in some of the other games we'd tried.  It was too complicated, poorly balanced...the tradeskills were a nightmare...  By the time I got to the game, a lot of that had been resolved.  The interdependence of the tradeskills was gone, the crafting process had been simplified so that it was one combine per item, the leveling curve had been smoothed out a little, and a lot of content that had formerly been targeted at groups was now soloable.  The game had, in short, been dumbed down, but in EQ2's case, it desperately needed it.  The game very nearly didn't survive because when it launched it was too clunky and complex- too far removed from the original Everquest for the diehards to really dig in, and not nearly as approachable as its competition to gain a foothold.  For my part, by the time I got to EQ2 I'd already sampled from World of Warcraft and a small host of other games.  I was refreshed by the difficulty, and fell in love with the quasi-anime styled graphics Sony had introduced with the Japanese launch of the game.  I rolled up one of the worst classes in the game at the time, a monk, and set about learning to tank.

I had a lot of good times in EQ2, and a lot of bad times.  I lost my hardcore cherry in Echoes of Faydwer, when the ex and I got into one of the top guilds in North America.  (And then we got booted when I neglected to pay our phone bill and we lost Internet access for three weeks.  -.-)  I was in one of the best guilds I've ever known, and developed the playstyle that has since become Tactical Dysfunction.  We took advantage of EQ2's post-Faydwer class flexibility and abused it to its fullest, with healer tanks and dps, tank healers, and all sorts of bonkers group and raid comps that should never have worked, but did.  Hell.  We did full raids with nothing but priests, just because we could- while the content was still of-level.

In short, my time in Everquest 2 made me the player I am today.  I learned how to examine even the most seemingly useless skills in a class's arsenal and find a use for them.  I learned the value of farming and patience, and how to optimize my time spent ingame for the best rewards.  EQ2 required me to spend time out in the world actually doing things at a time when World of Warcraft was becoming a mindless daily and faction grind.  I can't remember a time when the game turned into a log on, do the same stuff I did yesterday, log off grind.

That may be because I haven't played EQ2 in two years, but the fact that even after so long away from the game I've got the feels for it says something.

Probably the darkest moment in EQ2 history, for outsiders at least, was when the game went free to play.  Facing dwindling subs and income, Sony just about had to decide between shutting the doors or opening the floodgates, and for better or worse they decided on the latter.  While their F2P model isn't the greatest, the influx of players and its impact on the game itself is a case any student of MMORPGs should study.  In one fell swoop, they solved the problem of vacant cities (caused by the advent of guild halls), lack of low-level presence (your standard game aging), and unused content.  They made one of the biggest franchises in the industry accessible to everyone, though the free players faced some steep penalties.  To this day, Sony's freemium model makes me cringe when I add up the actual cost of trying to play the full game for free.  But then, their goal was to get people in the doors and then make them sub; not to let people freeload.  In that respect I guess, they were successful.

It was a good six years for me in EQ2, and judging by what my friends who still play the game have to say, it's been an even better ten.  One of these days I'll revisit the game and see what's changed.  If nothing else, it'll feed the nostalgia beast.

Buglords of Queuenor, or why I'm not monumentally pissed that I took time off for the Warlords of Draenor launch

It's not news by now that the Warlords of Draenor launch has been rough for Blizzard, who's managed some very polished expansion releases in the past.  We've had queues the like of which we haven't seen since vanilla or BC, crashes, disconnects, bugged out quests and perhaps most damning: the complete implosion of the expansion's main feature, Garrisons.  I got lucky in that Cookie and I both ordered retail, and couldn't even play Draenor (Draenic?) content until 10AM yesterday.  We missed out on the DDOS because of that and work; got enough behind the leveling pack that we don't have to face the competition, crashes, and sheer dickery that came because of the number of players in one small area; and had a more or less uninterrupted two windows of playtime.  The biggest hiccup we ran into was when the garrisons crashed around 3pm EST yesterday and I got stuck RP walking through the terrain on a flight path.  But like I said, we had to be to work anyway, so it was probably a good thing.

It kept us from calling out, which would have been bad, not least because the rest of the afternoon and evening was shot to shit by shoddy performance and hackattacks from China.  (A guildmate's conspiracy theory is that the Chinese farmers want to slow the progress down in NA and EU so that they can get ahead and then transfer their resources West and make buckets of money off gold sales.  I laughed.  He's probably not wrong, but it's still laughable.)

I know an expansion's not an easy thing.  And like with my calls for patience with ArcheAge's abysmal launch, I'm trying my best to keep an open mind and a level head about all of this.  When Cookie and I decided which days to request off, we sort of planned ahead for this- that's why we took Friday/Saturday/Sunday instead of launch day and the days after it.  The first day is always the roughest, and I'm guessing when the servers come up here in a little bit things are going to be better. Say what you want about Blizzard CS, they fix shit quickly.  With decades' worth of experience supporting multiplayer games, they'd better.
If you'd asked me last night how I felt about Draenor, I probably would have ranted, raged, and rampaged at you about broken this or bugged that.  I was pissed.  Then again, last night I ran into a quest in Frostwhatever-that-first-zone (too lazy to learn proper names, you should know me by now) that was set up basically as a scenario.  Cookie got credit for it, I didn't, and when I found out I couldn't complete it because the game had a set order of operations in mind and I hadn't followed it...

Freya's balls, you would have thought someone beheaded my puppy, pissed on it, and broadcast the whole thing on Al Jazeera.  I'd forgotten what tears of rage were like.  But I'm not the most...grounded of individuals at four in the morning after a sprint through content. I'm just not.

Anyway, the biggest complaint I've got about all of the Draenor bullshit is really that my free boost to 90 requires that I quest in Tanaan Jungle to get my ablities.  If I'd boosted a level one, I could understand treating me like a Deathkinght and making me earn my abilities, but for fuck's sake my rogue was 60.  The game TOOK AWAY her skills, left me with three skills, and said GG.  No vanish, no cloak of shadows.  Hell, no sap or recuperate.  What the hell were they thinking when they made that a thing.  All of the boosts before Draenor's release, free or otherwise, simply granted you a level ninety like it just popped out of an Easy-Bake Oven.  I understand that they couldn't do it that way with the Warlords content not out yet, but... fuckstockings, man.  You can't just TAKE THINGS AWAY from someone after they already had them.  And seriously?  Soloing this shit on a rogue without skills is worse than trying to do it as a holy priest.  At least they have fucking smite and can heal themselves.  I'm in shitty greens and have no access to any of my abilities or talents.  It's a fucking nightmare.

That, imo, is the BIGGEST mistake Blizz made with the launch.  Not the Garrisons bugs, not failing to anticipate Every WoW Player Ever coming back for the xpack and anniversary...  The motherfucking boosts.

Which reminds me.  I need to feedback that shit.

All in all, it's a rough launch, but not as bad as it could have been.  The game's still playable, the layout and design of the new zones is kind of cool (if a little Wrathy so far with all the damn snow and cliffs), and I've only had a few instances of OH JESUS GOD WHY OH FUCK GET IT OFF MY FACE because I explored someplace I shouldn't have been.  I'm a little disappointed that I can't get ANY upgrades to my gear until like 98, but... ultimately, that's the price for having raid gear.  It's a good thing in the long run, because it means the stat inflation won't be as bad as it has been in the past.  (Cataclysm, Pandaria...I'm looking at you.)

The After Dark crew is going to be streaming live for most of the day through the weekend, so you've got plenty of opportunities to drop by and say hi.

Anniversary Flashbacks, One of...several

2014 is kind of a big year for MMORPGS, mostly because 2004 was a HUGE year for the genre.  Ten years ago we saw the release of three of the most notable games of the second/third (depending upon your reckoning) generation: Everquest 2, City of Heroes, and World of Warcraft.  I wish I could say I got in on the ground floor of all three, but I passed up the City of Heroes beta/release for Lineage 2, and hadn't yet lost my cherry to the Everquest franchise when the sequel came out.  Still, it was a great time, and even though it makes me an old fuck, I'm proud to say I lived and played through it.

The first gen of MMOs was only in its fifth or sixth year when 2004 started.  The genre was still more or less young, and publishers were only just beginning to realize the potential profit from persistent-world games thanks to Everquest and Asian titles like Lineage.  Back then, nobody knew how long one of these things could last, and I can only assume that Sony, EA, and other wayback machine publishers were hedging their bets that five years was the longest a single game could hold a solid playerbase. Graphics had lept forward in quality since 1999, and it was time for a little sumpin' sumpin' more.

I remember being skeptical of the second gens.  I was playing Lineage 2 at the time, and adored its then-gorgeous, anime-style graphics.  EQ2's graphics struck me as play-doh-esque, City of Heroes was just a dumb comic book game, and WoW...  I loathed WoW.  My guildmates dragged me into beta kicking and screaming, and I hated every minute of it.  Going from L2's click-to-move, limited-hotbar grindathon to WoW was like going from vanilla ice cream to hot dogs.  But when the choice came down to World of Warcraft or GuildWars, I opted for the former...and that only because I hated not being able to change my abilities in GW. 

I'm one of THOSE WoW players.  You know the breed.  We sit back and remember fondly how we had to pay piles of gold for our epic mounts, and how hard that gold was to come by.  We laugh about our completely wonky hybrid builds, using spirit gear on our bears and int gear on our hunters.  We wax rhapsodic about needing groups for devilsaurs in Un'goro Crater so we could get their skins and keying for Molten Core.  The game was so much harder back then, we say.  More dynamic.  There were more ways to fuck up.

And yet, at the time, WoW was the easiest game on the market.  A lot of people forget that when it released, World of Warcraft's biggest innovation was simple, streamlined questing.  Previous games had required you to talk to your questgivers and guess at phrases that would trigger the next step of the conversation.  There weren't quest journals- unless you counted the notebooks we kept close to hand on our desks.  You could SOLO in WoW.  On any class.  The same couldn't be said of the other MMOs out at the time.  And tradeskills... Holy shit, a crafting system that wouldn't give you carpal tunnel or randomly fail/blow up your gear?  No meaningful death penalty, bonus xp while logged out...

I still remember camping out at the border between Ashenvale and the Barrens during world PvP gluts, cutting off reinforcements headed for the Crossroads.  My hunter buddy and I merrily duoed through content we probably shouldn't have been able to do because we had the right combination of heals, damage, and kiting.  My go-to story has always been the time I killed my ghost with fatigue while trying to find the second pearl for my druid's water form quest.  It seems farfetched these days, but back then that kind of stupid shit happened every day.

It's been a fun ten years.  I've played a lot of games, and over the next few updates I'm going to be revisiting some of my favorite moments, mechanics, and memes from the last decade.  Somewhere in the mix I'm going to give City of Heroes the writeup it deserves, because my "In Memoriam" post fell well short of what I'd originally intended.

Got some memories of your own?  Give me a yell on Google +, Facebook, or Twitter and share your stories!  Never know...might show up on the blog or stream!

Seven days and counting

Warlords is a week away, and the excitement is building here in the house of Kattz.  Sort of.  We finally have both copies paid off, we have our weekend away from work secured...  Our plans are set and we're ready to go.

And we have six new kittens.  Because our cat Fiona is a ho.

Yeah...

It's going to be interesting streaming Draenor, and I plan to be streaming close to twenty hours a night during release weekend, with six eight-day-old kittens mewing and meeping at me.

Not much of an update, for now.  Been too busy with the babies to really do much gaming.

Ole!

Another year, still no mount

I swear to by Freya's flying fucking cats, the horse off Headless Horseman must be the most godawfully rare mount ever.  I've been trying for three years or something to get the thing, and STILL have not gotten it.  And that's with pulling Horseman every day on at least two if not five characters.  That's not even taking into account the years I did the fucker before I decided I wanted his mount.

I got the Raven Lord on my second run.  Why can I not get that damn pumpkin headed fuck's mount?

Anyway.  After making an ass of myself on Twitter, I found out that there is a Bronze Dragonflight npc in Blasted Lands that will teleport you "back in time" to the old version of Blasted Lands, which makes it so you can get the candy bucket there.  So many hours of rage and frustration wasted because I didn't notice the random NPC sitting in a random fucking spot in the middle of nowhere.

And before you say it was in the patch notes, I don't care if it was.  I pretty much skimmed through the shit to find the monk changes and moved on.

So now that Halloween is passed, we're officially on the countdown to Warlords of Draenor's release on November 13th.  That's ten days, kids.  Are YOU prepared?  Because I sure as shit ain't.  I'm still sitting at around 70k of my 100k goal, primarily because I had the genius idea to put together a set of mistweaver gear and fuck around on alts instead of going out and farming.  I could pretty easily make a good 10k or more off the herbs in my bank, but like a pro I'm respeccing my tradeskill to alchemy, so... that's out.  Go figure.

Ultimately, the 100k number was something I picked out of the air on a whim.  Still want to see if I can make 30k in ten days.  Given that's only 3k a day, I think I'm in a good position to do it.  I just need to stop SPENDING the fucking money as fast as I make it.

Aside from money and tradeskill catching up, though, we don't have much to do in World of Warcraft until the expansion hits.  It's hard to get motivated for a raid when you know that two weeks from now you'll be wearing quest greens that are ten times better.  The only folks with anything to push for are the poor fucks who haven't gotten their cloaks yet, because in ten days they won't be able to get it at all.  I've got it on my main.  Mostly there on a lot of my alts, but they're not getting played for probably the next year, so they can go fuck themselves.  Heh.

I wish they'd put in something more in the way of an expansion hype event, with how long we're having to wait for the thing to drop.  This is the most confusing mix of kid at Christmas and senioritis I've ever experienced, and it's very much likely to drive me insane.

Er.  More insane.

Anyway!  Monday and Thursday are this week's Early Edition streams (5pm est).  The rest of the week we'll be running After Dark from 11pm until I fall the fuck out of my chair around 2am or 3am.  Drop by the stream and check out the newly (re)updated graphics!

Sweatpants Sunday!

I'm not entirely sure how my show titles happen.  I'm pretty sure Sweatpants Sunday was the result of me having no clean clothes to wear and streaming with yoga pants and a hoodie on...and nothing else.  Like, commando, no tshirt, no bra...  Just a hoodie and some yoga pants.  Go go people of Walmart.  On livestreams.  Somehow, Sweatpants Sunday has turned into a fixture of my week, to the point where I pretty much start freaking out like an Autistic kid if something might jeopardize it.

But what IS Sweatpants Sunday?  It's almost always a World of Warcraft stream, for one.  Sunday is, historically, the absolute worst day to run LFR, look for pickup groups, and what have you... and most weeks it's the first day where I'm actually able to sit down and grind those out.  (On account of typically being off work on Mondays.)  Sweatpants Sunday is usually rage-filled, hate-spewing, crisis-having, complete and utter fail, and for some reason I love every minute of it.

This Sweapants Sunday is going to be a little different, but I have a feeling it'll be no less lulzy.  I'll be running a bunch of old raids, including Naxxramas and probably Icecrown Citadel for money, cloth, and mounts.  Especially if I do ICC, the lulz will blot out the sun, because I am ABYSMAL at soloing that zone.  (It doesn't help that I have to swap to a mistweaver spec for which I have no gear to get past the green dragon encounter.)  Still, it's Sweatpants Sunday, and I am very much excited for tonight's stream.

It's funny, but I've got myself worked into a sort of schedule now.  Sweatpants Sunday, Welfare Wednesday, and Fucking Fail Friday are the ones that stick out, mostly because I haven't been able to come up with something alliterative and fun for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday.  Those days are usually After Dark with Katt and Cookie, with some sub-title.  (The most recent, which trumped Fail Friday, was our Diablo 3 "In Hell" series.)  I like to think that having an eye-catching title helps bring people to the show when I'm competing with established streamers like Swifty, Toweliee, and Ducksauce.  You know, the people who are already Twitch partners and all that stuff.  So yeah.

...

This post is not pasted on, it's just more about streaming and how I'm trying to get myself established than about the actual games.  DEAL WIF IT!  ^.^

I promised new graphics, and I delivered.  Feedback on the new color scheme, as well as the "I have art skills like a three year old" crayon graphics would be muchly appreciated.  I like them, and Cookie's been a lot of help in figuring out things like "that background is too busy" or "your cats look completely fucktarded."  But an outside perspective is always nice.  Check out the links at the top of the page as well.  I'm now on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.  You know you wanna clickie.  (And after you do that, click the donate button on the sidebar, for the sake of kitties.  ^.~)

And hell.  If you like the stream, or my videos, or even just this blog... Spread the word!  Tell your friends, or anyone you think I won't grossly offend.  Write my URLs on bathroom stalls.  (You laugh, but once upon a time I used that as a recruiting method for one of my guilds.)  Help me out!  I'll love you forever.  From a distance.  Like Bette Midler.

Warlords of Draenor Prep - Let's Get Down To Business

We have just about four weeks until Warlords of Draenor drops, and it's time we all got serious about our pre-expansion preparations.  Here in the Katthouse, that extends to polishing my streaming technique, getting videos up and running on YouTube, freshening up the over-all appearance of the images I've got on everything, and trying to figure out how to actually get people to click the magical donate button.  It's a lot to figure out how to squish into the hours of free time I get after work, especially since every time I decide to write here or work on videos, I have this overwhelming feeling of "I should be streaming right now instead."  That's probably a good thing, ultimately, but with things like my housework, this blog, and my kitteh faction suffering...  Something I need to learn to ignore.

So first off: WoW ingame shit!  I'm still thirty-odd thousand gold away from my 100k patchday goal.  I have three resets left between now and then, which means (given that I haven't run any retro raids yet) I can make maybe another 15k-ish off of those.  I've been actually raiding on Roxtoberfest (the monk), so I'm budgeting about 1500 a week for expenses.  That leaves me with 20k to make on my own.  I have a few things I could do for that, including selling off my Cursed Birman for 250k (the current asking price for the new Halloween event kitties on my server), but I kind of like those pets.  They're cute, and ghosty.

Freya's balls, I sound like Cookie now.

I've also apparently got some legwork to do with my tanking.  Yesterday morning, Cookie and I ran some UBRS with me tanking and her healing me on her undergeared priest and shaman, and we discovered that I'm apparently hard to heal, while our DK tank in guild is not.  (You can watch the videos here, here, and
here.)  After some trial and error with other healers, looking over my meters, and talking with said DK, we came up with three probable culprits:

• Shuffle Uptime: Mine was sitting at about 85%.  I need to up that at least 10%, seeing as it's a major class mitigation thing.
• Elusive Brew use: I'm notorious for NOT using elusive brew.  I think I looked at it once, went "this is only good against physical attacks" and said fuck it.  Now that I'm actually HAVING to use it, my fingers aren't used to hitting that hotkey.  Definitely my focus for improvement right now.
• Dodge sucks for aoe: The more mobs I pull, the more checks per second I'm getting against my dodge rolls.  Brewmasters are meant to get hit infrequently, but hit hard when something gets through.  The more fatassing and not interrupting/killing banners that happens, the more I'm going to get punched in the dick.  Plain and simple.

Honestly, it was one of the more constructive screaming matches I've had with Cookie in a long time.  Now if only we could keep people who don't know what the FUCK they're talking about from interjecting..

Stream shit abrupt segue!  I need to really focus on my game/bullshit balance.  As Cookie pointed out, some days I'm really game oriented and some days I just ramble about whatever is going on in chat.  This is great, except it makes it hard to define the stream, and since people go to certain streams looking for certain qualities...  It makes it hard to develop the community and gain loyal followers.  As in the people who will hopefully sub once I get partnered on Twitch.  I've also got to work on how I interact with my viewers, because so far I've had a hard time keeping my "safe space" policy from creating dramaz.  (Which is to say I've had problems with it once, and it was implosive.)  If you're a viewer, or you've been thinking about checking it out, now's a good time if you want to help me crystallize my identity.

And... Brand shit!  I'm going to be working on some new graphics in my off hours, hopefully cleaning things up and making it a little less...crazy cat lady.  Also, I don't like that blue and yellow color scheme.  I'm not sure what I'm moving to yet, but hopefully I'll have that done before Draenor.

Anyway, be sure to check out the totally AMAZEBALLS Kleptokatt Youtube Channel!  And the stream!  And follow me on Twitter!  And...like... donate!  The more y'all help with ads and donations, the more I can focus on bringing you totally sweet content.  (Like properly edited videos and graphics that aren't made in MSPaint.)

Catch y'all on the Stream!

The Morning After - Disappointment and Rage

Patch 6.0.2 was pretty much the MMORPG equivalent of my last heterosexual encounter.  I wanted to like it.  A lot.  I was all excited, and I thought it would be this great, game-changing thing...  And then I spent the night yelling "Oh come on" and "just fix it already."  When I woke up this morning, much like that long-ago morning, all I felt was bitterness, disappointment, and anger at my wasted time.  This patch was a complete goddamn letdown, and if it's any indication of what I can expect from Warlords, it may yet make a confirmed Riftsexual out of me.  Or send me crawling back to Everquest.  Who knows?

Seriously though.  Blizz pushed this patch back by months, put it through extensive testing on the PTR and beta servers, and... We get a patch with a completely broken LFG UI, crashing raid zones, derptastical lag spikes, and mobs that are alternately too friggin' easy or too friggin' hard.  I brought this up to my guild last night, and they kept making excuses and trying to shush me.

Oh, a patch is a really complicated piece of coding.

Oh, this is the biggest mechanics patch WoW's ever had.

Oh, you're just overreacting.

No.  I am not motherfucking overreacting, and if I didn't have two X chromosomes and a higher pitched voice, you wouldn't be reacting this way to me.  You'd just agree with me and let it fucking drop.  But no.  You're a goddamn misogynist and you just allow me to exist because you think I'm a fucking unicorn outlier who's actually good at what she does.  (They don't want me to tank either, even though I'm fucking good at THAT.  Fuckers.)

Yesterday, after I patched, the LFG interface was completely fucking broken.  Blizz has been touting this repackaging of OpenQueue as its big innovation, and on day one we get something that's barely useable.  Groups don't pop, instances crash, the interface hallucinates and tells you you're queued for too much stuff even when you're not fucking queued for ANYTHING...

And to top it off, when they squished the stats of everything in the game, some monsters ended up too high on the difficulty curve, and some much too low.  I can roflstomp stuff on Isle of Giants now, but trying to kill the yanguol on Timeless Isle leaves me having to actually use cooldowns.  Don't get it.

They upped the difficulty of some fights in Seige LFR, and I don't remember seeing that listed ANYWHERE in the patchnotes.  Doing Sha last night in wing 1 resulted in THREE FUCKING WIPES because people actually had to do flex-style mechanics.  Fortunately, I was tanking with a guildie, so we were able to coordinate swaps and stuff on vent.  I don't want to know what LFR Garrosh looks like right now, I really don't.

The shiny new pre-expansion questline is completely fucking pasted on.  Battlefield Barrens, before SoO's release, set the fucking bar for events as far as I'm concerned.  There was a bunch of stuff to do, there were meaningful rewards, and it kept me engaged and invested for more than fifteen minutes.  Iron Horde Invasion?  ONE quest chain, with a pet (admittedly a cool battlepet) as the reward.  No title.  No taking the fight to them.  Just "Oh hey, these guys are coming through the Dark Portal, go kill them."  Why can we not try to fight them on the other side of the Dark Portal?  Hellfire Peninsula's gotta be FULL of the fuckers.  They should have some higher-ranking commanders over there.  And what about defectors?  Give us some new characters to get to know.

But no.  One quest chain.  Sub-par rewards.  A half-open level 90 version of the revamp dungeon with 550 rewards that...suck.  Seriously, these pieces just exist for ilvl padding, at this point. 

Yeah.  UBRS.  Let's talk about that.

All through beta and ptr testing of this shit, I've been hearing that the instances were difficult, they were engaging... and then Blizz pulls out the last minute nerfbat and makes the content laughable.  EVERY.  SINGLE.  FIGHT. in the level 90 version is a turn and burn fight.  The first boss has the absolute MOST by way of mechanics, because there are things you have to click.  Oh holy shit.  It's a turn and burn with a twist of lime.  GG, Blizz.  The zone uses some bastardized version of Flex loot, where you just get what you get, and it's not even spec-specific.  I am set to mistweaver loot because it's the only spec I don't have geared over 555, and I get shitty agi gloves constantly.  Yay.  And with the instance being set to flex loot instead of drop and roll, it turns what could be a really easy pick up and drag zone to gear new 90s into a fucking boring ass grind.

GG Blizz.

This patch left me with a MAJOR bad taste in my mouth, and I'm really hoping that the Molten Core update for the 10th anniversary event shines, because if not I'll have pretty much completely abandoned all hope of a good expansion.  And it's a shame, because I was finally starting to buy into the hype.

Patch Day! WoW 6.0.2

It's patch day, and we've got just under an hour until the North American World of Warcraft servers come back up.  This is where most bloggers would write about the exciting changes coming with the patch, everything you need to know to transition seamlessly into the post-stat-squish world, and the major changes to the flavors of the month.

I'm not most bloggers.  Because there are patch notes, and you should read the fucking patch notes.  If you gave a flying rat's ass, you'd have already read several VERSIONS of the patch notes as 6.0.2 went through its time on the PTR.  It's not my fucking fault if you waited until the last minute to do your homework.  I carried your kind through high school, and I'm sure as shit not going to do it in MMORPGs.

Today is patch day, and my personal deadline for deciding what I'm going to play in Draenor.  I know I'd previously stated (like, about a week ago) that I was switching to a resto shammy, and I spent like two or three weeks going on and on about the damn shaman and leveling her on my stream.  That was all more or less the direct result of guild drama, and my desire to say FUCK YOU to my guild leader's girlfriend.

And that's no longer an issue in my life.  Remember the last post?  About Trojan Horses?  Yeah...  I built one all well and good, and my GM went full retard and opened the thing before I was ready.  The short version of the long and glorious implosion is that our main tank (and a friend of mine and Cookie's) started asking questions about what we would actually be DOING before the expansion hits.  And Cookie helped, because when someone else is stirring the pot, she'll gladly turn up the heat.  The GM gets all butthurt and defensive right out of the gate, and starts flipping out.  Guildkicks our tank.  I look at Cookie and tell her I'm done, pull all of my alts, and then pull my main from the guild.  She starts doing the same...

And then the GM's girlfriend gets involved.  And I have to remind Cookie that I can't afford to bail her ass out of jail if she kills the bitch. See, the GM's girlfriend is CRAZY, but she knows us IRL and likes to pretend she's superior to me because I'm medicated and she's not.  And Cookie almost throttled the kid the last time she started hurling insults behind my back about my treatment, so...

Yeah.  Anyway, that guild is no more.  Cookie, our friends, and I packed up and moved over to a stagnant level 25 guild one of them had.  It will be renamed Tactical Dysfunction, and it will be GLORIOUS.

As soon as I have ten bucks with which to rename the guild.

So anyway, now I have the option to switch back to my monk if I want, be our second tank, and recruit two healers and some DPS for our Core Raid Team.  I"ve been playing my monk the last couple days, nominally farming, and I fucking love it.  Love it in the face.  So...  yeah.  There's a very good chance I'm going to do that.

And that's my Patch Day!  Seriously, go read the fucking patch notes.  And stay away from crazy Guild Masters and their girlfriends.  And use protection.  <3

The Trojan Horse - Words From The Dark Side

The beauty of classic literature is that it remains relevant down through the generations.  One of the more important lessons a prospective guild leader can take away from our forebears comes out of the Iliad: the Trojan Horse.

Short version: this guy Odysseus decides he wants to sack an impregnable city.  He knows they have a thing for horses, so he says "hey look.  Let's build this giant fucking horse and give it to them as a peace offering.  Make it look like we've sailed home, and left them this cool thing as tribute."  Since the Trojans were a proud, dumb-as-dogshit people, he knew they'd fall for it.  The catch was that the entire army would sit up inside this horse, and as soon as they were inside the city and the victory feasting had wound down, leaving a bunch of drunk and over-sexed Trojans all over the place...they'd just slip out and murderelate the entire lot of them.

Aaand it worked.  Because Odysseus was smart enough to understand his enemy's weakness, and charismatic enough to get people to go along with his plan.

So how does this apply to becoming a guild leader?

The Trojan Horse is one of the most underhanded, devious ways to put together your guild, but it's disgustingly effective.  You would like to think that guild leaders would be savvy enough to recognize the signs and symptoms of losing their grip on their guild...but nope.  Most of them will just blissfully go along and assume everything is okay, even while everything is going up in flames around them.  I have never gone into a guild expecting to usurp its membership or take over its leadership.  Generally speaking, I slowly build my horse around me without even trying.  Over the years, through careful analysis of my successes and failings as an officer, I've come up with an actual methodology for Trojan Horsing a guild.

• Step 1:  Find a guild.
• If you're ultimately looking to raid, find a raiding guild that takes socials.  If you're looking to hardcore raid, find a decent casual guild that says it's looking to progress more seriously
• Basically, find a group that has a thinly-veiled weakness that you can easily parse from your interactions with their recruiter or public relations person, and stat focusing your efforts on picking that apart.
• If they want low-drama, but have high drama, comment on that frequently
• If they want to progress, but are deadlocked, suggest ways to break through
• If they want to have fun, act the clown and then be loud when you are shut down
•  Step 2: Make yourself invaluable to the guild.
• Support their guild bank
• Donate crafting materials
• Give them money
• Give them expensive consumables
• Be the peacemaker
• When there is discontent among members, commiserate and offer to speak to leadership on their behalf
• Be sympathetic to all complaints, even if they seem minor
• Offer up solutions of your own, that do not involve the guild or its leadership at all
• Step 3: Create your own guild, either openly or on the sly
• Level it
• Populate it with randoms
• Low levels, casuals, and other guilds' malcontents are easy fodder
• Promise nothing.
• Allow them to come and go as they please.  You're NOT looking to hold onto these people.  Remember: you're bringing your CORE from another guild.  Invest your time into them.
• Mention the guild to your cultivated friends in the Trojan guild, when the leadership isn't around.  Invite them to discuss how they might run things better. Stir the pot, gently, but do not add to it.  Do not attract attention to yourself.
• Step 4: Create the necessary guild forums, websites, rules, and guidelines
• Have all of your expectations codified in advance
• Outline clearly your plan for the future, and be ready to act on it
• Allow yourself some targeted contrast between the Trojan guild and yourself
• Make it clear that your guild is the solution to all of the other guild's problems
• Step 5: Wait
• Step 6: When the time is right,  call out the guild leadership.
• Make sure to hit all of their weaknesses
• Highlight what you have done for the guild and how you have tried to help overcome the guild's problems
• Leave, loudly and publicly, and invite others to do so as well
• Step 7: Be the bigger man.  The Trojan guild will likely lash out against you publicly.  Let them.  Be welcoming to your new guild members, and focus on getting up and moving.  Do not let yourself be baited in chat.  ALWAYS be professional, courteous, and respectful in public AND private interactions with members of the other guild.  Screenshots can kill just as easily as poachers and Trojan Horses.  Don't give them anything they can use against you.  Ultimately, the one-two punch of you taking their guild and them making asses of themselves in public will cripple their chances of ever functioning under that tag again, even if they try to rebuild.

Yes, this is written from the bent of one who is intent upon using the Trojan Horse as a revenge tool.  I really am that conniving that I would put this kind of time and work into undermining a guild leader, officer core, and brand.  Properly executing a Trojan Horse within a guild requires patience, knowledge of guild leadership, charisma, and tact.  Oh, and focus.  That's why it lends itself so easily to being a revenge tool: whatever wrongs you've experienced or whatever hate you feel sharpens your focus so that you can do what is necessary to make it work.

A week late and... fifty bucks short?

If you follow me on Twitter or watch my daily stream on Twitch.tv, you know by now that my infatuation with ArcheAge was short-lived.  If you're not following me... WHY THE FUCK NOT?  Seriously.  Just reading this blog is like getting maybe HALF the Katt experience.  Do yourself a favor and follow me on Twitch and Twitter like...now.  You won't regret it.  (I've even fixed the spam issue with Twitch's Twitter sharing, so you don't have THAT fucking thing to whine about any more.)

It may seem weird for me to drop the game like a hot potato after sitting through the queue debacle, and the patron/f2p war, and all that.  I was even thinking seriously about establishing a branch of Tactical Dysfunction in ArcheAge.  I was putting together lengthy posts about mechanics and builds that hadn't made the site yet, and then... BOOM.  I get sick for five days and come out on the other side subscribed to World of Warcraft and playing that so much that I've been neglecting the blog, and Twitter, and pretty much everything else in my life.

Except showering.  I'm not the smelly WoW girl.  But pretty much everything else that I've been working for the last three months to build up and market.

So what the FUCK is it about WoW that can make me pretty much snap into grind mode, even after I've panned the upcoming expansion as boring and recycled, and bitched at length about the collective stupidity of the six million people that still play the game? 

One word:  Duty.

A few months ago, my friends and I sat in my living room and abstractly discussed leading a progression raid team in Warlords of Draenor.  Half of us were drunk, so I pretty much dismissed the conversation as never-gonna-happen...  And then out of the blue I start getting texts about how they need to know NOW what I'm playing and if I'm going to be playing the expansion at all, and there's all this drama, and my case of fuckits turns into a case of fuckyous.  And now I have this sick fixation on showing up my guild leader's girlfriend.

Not only that, I'm getting back into guild leader mode myself, which is...bad.  Because I'm convinced that this guild's leadership is donig it all wrong.  (Which they are, and that's going to be probably my next writeup for this blog.  How to properly set your fucking guild up as a new or transfer guild.)  All because I decided to give some prissy little princess the finger, I'm grinding up ANOTHER (this is my third) shaman, on a more or less new server, and I'm hellbent on being geared and having 100k by the time the expansion drops.

In like...a month and ten days.

I've decided I have a duty to fuck with these people, and to be a fucking amazing resto shaman, and for whatever reason that trumps every other goddamn thing going on in my head.

I only ever get this way about two games:  Everquest II and World of Warcraft.  In both games I've had guilds I was an officer or leader in.  Both games have given me people that I have to say "fuck you" to, and show up.  I can only assume that THAT is the secret sauce that makes a game unquittable.  That's how Everquest became Evercrack.  That's how WoW's managed to keep its subscription numbers higher than the industry average even after ten years and some spectacular design fails.  By which I mean Worgen.  (Sony redesigned Qeynos and Freeport and half the population ragequit because of nostalgia.  Blizz blew Stormwind and Theramore the fuck up, and started a goddamn civil war that killed off some beloved characters and people pretty much decided fuck you Blizz, we're going to save these places.)

So word of advice to devs and aspiring devs:  If you can get your entire playerbase, after launch, to say Fuck You In The Cunt, either to the game or the rest of the playerbase or even to you, you're doing it right.

That's really the only conclusion I can draw.

So now I find myself needing money to actually PURCHASE WoD in a month (which is...a stretch, because we're now three months behind on all of our bills because of my mental implosion...  See On the Rox for more on THAT saga of fail), and working my fucking ass off to be the envy of all these goddamn scrubs that don't have a fucking clue what actual commitment looks like.

Goddamn it.  I was having fun in ArcheAge, too.

Dead on Arrival

Once upon a time, there was a guild on Rift's Faeblight server that, for our purposes, we will call Our Gang.  In all seriousness, this is just a pseudonym, because this post is going to be airing out a lot of dirty guild laundry, and I'm changing everything to protect the derps involved in the RL events I'm about to describe.

Now that the disclaimer's out of the way...

Once upon a time, there was a guild on Rift's Faeblight server called Our Gang.  A lot of good people were in Our Gang, since it had cannibalized the top-end raiders from several smaller launch guilds.  We all came together through a difficult-to-describe series of public raid rifts, expert dungeon crawls, and tradeskill contracting.  At the time, we were more or less the best on the server, and we were tired of being held back by our launch guilds.  It just seemed natural to join up under the same tag.

Our Gang was, initially, a family guild led by a husband/wife duo.  We'll call them Optimus and Banshee, respectively.  A lot of the guild was made up of people that had played other games with them, but by virtue of having the then best-in-class rogue and cleric for our server, they got a whole bunch of hardcore raid nerds.  They were used to not being challenged by their raiders.  Their word was law, and for years their guildies had simply trusted that they were right in whatever they said.  Perhaps most importantly, they had been to this point casuals, and were being more or less pushed into a more aggressive playstyle by the rest of us.

The guild was, in short, a powder keg not entirely unlike the Balkans pre-WWI.  A lot of strong personalities fell into the guild: myself, my friend Herpes (an aspiring main tank, and probably at the time one of the best tanks on the server), my long-time guildmates from EQ2, Bob, and Mark.  (Bob and Mark were a brother/brother duo, and the cleric/rogue that the raid team crystallized around.)  And we all had very strong ideas of how a guild should be run for progression.  Our leaders, sadly, didn't have the same ideas.

I promise, I'm getting to a point.  Just stay with me.

Optimus was nominally our guild leader, and he was on board for what we suggested- trials, set raid times, who should lead raids, how to handle loot...  At least, he was on board until Banshee opened her mouth.  As far as she was concerned, the guild only existed to serve her needs, and we were to obey her every order regardless of how on-point those orders actually were.  Worst of all, Banshee played a rogue- like me and Bob- and thought she was hot shit.

Holy mother of fuck.  She was terrible.  Her dps was abysmal, so she played a bard.  Cool.  Support's not hard.  Just keep your motifs up.

Only no.  She had to say she was the alpha bard and knew all.  Saw all.

I was a bard too.  Kinda got railroaded into it because I had (a) skill and (b) a third core set up just for bard offhealing.  (This was back when the heal greaters would proc off everything, and so would the heal trinkets.)  Generally, I was number three on the heal parse, my motifs never dropped, I kept my debuffs cycled...

And yet I was doing it wrong, because I wasn't playing her way.  Never mind that her group was consistently over-performed by mine, even when we switched so that she had the star players and I had the B team.  Anyone who pointed that out was harshly reprimanded, and usually saw their loot privileges negatively impacted.  Compounding the problem was that Optimus wanted to be the big dick tank, and couldn't handle the job.  Herpes challenged him on it, and was kicked from the guild.  (There was also loot drama involved, because he thought as the best tank in the guild he should get all the plate, but that's another rant for another day.)

The house of cards just collapsed from there.  Our hardcores, myself included, bailed on the guild when we couldn't down anything past the second boss of Greenscale a month and a half later.  What could have been a great guild was fuckbliterated, and all because one over-controlling, cocky bitch couldn't get her head out of her ass long enough to see reason, or understand what her guild's actual needs were.

The moral of the story?  Don't let your significant other be an officer in your guild unless you know for a FACT that you can stand up to them and stick to your guns with guild policy.  And don't raid with your significant other, unless you know for a fact that they can separate the game from your relationship.  I know every gamer dreams of finding another game to spend his or her life with but honestly?  Unless you have complementary playstyles, butts will get hurt and your relationship will suffer.  And your guild.  And everything else.

Another case in point: I used to play MMOs with my ex.  We always duoed, and viewed ourselves as a package deal.  I tanked, he was support, and life was good.  After a few months' raiding with a casual family guild, he gets approached by one of the top guilds NA to be their new dirge.  (EQ2.  Sorry.  Should have said that.  Aaaanyway.)  He was great at it.  It was an awesome opportunity.  They even agreed to give me a trial as an offtank, in case someone in their core raid couldn't make it.

I was bad.  I'm not even gonna lie.  This was early in my MMO career, the class I was playing was badly handicapped at the time, and even if I'd been an amazing player my gear was horrid.  I didn't have the sense to see that at the time, though, and just fucking RAGED when they told me how bad I was.  We had some serious fights irl about getting us kicked from the guild, I slept on the couch for a few weeks, and in the end... we both ended up getting kicked.  Our relationship never really recovered from that, and every time something happened in game from there on out, it led to screaming matches and shit getting thrown.  It's extreme-sounding, I know, but when you've got two people who want to be the best and are passionate about learning and working to advance their characters...

Yeah.  You butt heads.  And if you can't keep ingame STRICTLY ingame, you're in for a bad time.

All this works around to why I don't want to be in a guild that's run by a couple, especially one that's half hardcore and half casual.  I've been down the "I'm the guildleader's gf/wife, so you have to keep me happy" road.  I've seen what it does to guilds, and how it leeches the respectability from GMs.  The drama that spawns from behind-the-scenes relationships just turns into a cancer in most cases.

Look at it this way, right?  Happy wife, happy life.  Most folks don't want to antagonize their other half.  They want them to be happy, so things stay copacetic.  And like it or not, the other half's going to want first dibs on everything, because that's just how it goes.  Humans are needy.

So basically... friends don't let friends lead guilds with their girlfriends.  It's a good way to destroy friendships, and a GREAT way to make sure your guild's dead before you even get off the ground.

Pizza, Servers, and You

Earlier today I compared the queue crisis to a pizza party on the ArcheAge forums.  It seemed to go over well, and I think it's pretty much a spot on analogy

Duh. Because I wrote it.  I'm not going to write a blog post and link some bullshit thing in the very first sentence.

Seriously, though, the ArcheAge release has been like a pizza party that had two hundred people show up instead of twenty.  The two new servers that went live today (Ezi and Lucius) are a good start.  They're like an extra dozen pizzas to take the edge off.  It's not the end of the problem, but it's a start.  Disabling character creation on Aranzeb, Kyrios, Ollo, and Salphira helps in a big way, too.  I know people are butthurt because they're established on those servers and now their friends can't get in on the action, but it's what needs to happen until the population stabilizes and finds its equilibrium point.

I know last night I was raging.  It was a bad night to write a post, especially about ArcheAges queues, because I'd pretty much gotten to play for like five minutes and sat in three queues.  Router resets, disconnects, and flat-out just spazzing pretty much killed the day for me.  Today, fortunately, went a lot better, and I'm glad folks on the stream have been more or less patient with me through all of this.

When Scapes dropped us a hint about the new servers, he stated that they would be on clusters 5 and 6 for the AH.  When Ezi and Lucius came up, we only had cluster 5.  This makes me think that after tomorrow morning's server maint. there's a good chance we'll see more NA server.  No more details have been released about the upcoming EU servers since we found out that they were going through customs on their way to the Amsterdam hosting site.

Things still aren't quite coming up roses for ArcheAge, but the server woes are on their way to being solved.

Don't forget to tune in tomorrow at 5(ish, assuming I don't get held up at the pharmacy) for another episode of the ArcheAge Queuecast.

QueueAge QueueCasting

Surprise surprise, ArcheAge's queues have only gotten worse since the game opened its doors to the unwashed masses of my fellow froobie players.  I understand Trion's hesitation to introduce too many servers at launch, given how much server downsizing even freshly-released games have had to do in the wake of hyped launches that failed to retain players.  Really I do.

But right now, we are sitting at something like four to five thousand players in the queue for each server, if not more.  Even patrons are reporting five to eight hour queue times.  Tonight's stream window was literally ALL filled with waiting on the queue, which left me casting to an empty room about the forums drama, buildcraft, and my desperate need for a parser so I can start digging into the game's combat mechanics. 

I should really look and see if there's an ACT plugin for the game yet.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, fortunately.  Trion's CEO appeared on the forums today, more or less apologizing for the giant clusterfuck and assuring us that they were in the process of establishing more servers.  It's...better than nothing.  And certainly better than the three or four tweets @ArcheAge sent out about how they were going to be aggressively kicking people going AFK with their mounts ingame.

>.>  Sorry guys, but between the labor system only giving free players points while they're logged in and the mounts only leveling while they're actually out and being used...  That should have been expected.  And probably was expected.  I'm just kind of curious why Trion and XL didn't hook up BEFORE launch to integrate Trion's shnifty anti-botting/anti-spam software.

Ah well.  Barn door after the cows are loose, or whatever.

Skillset hype!  In spite of the fact that Auramancy and Shadowplay are currently the two most used sets according to Arche-Base's builder, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth at the overpoweredness of Archery.  Because OMGNOES we can kill from range.  That...you know... being the point of archery.  Never mind that archery builds tend to be squishy, especially when CCd- even Stonearrows.  Or that you can change your build and level the other schools to counter whatever it is you're having issues with.

It's cool.  This is QueueAge, after all.  It's brought to you by the letter Q and the number 420 if you believe the forums.  A little QQing is to be expected.

Hopefully tonight I'll be able to get in and do some more grinding so I can theoretically start streaming PvP early next week.  I'm still playing Trickster, and liking it a LOT.  I wish I had some self-healing or something, but so far it's working well.  And I've only gotten my elk killed a half dozen times.  (For a good time, summon your mount while it's dead.  It falls out of the sky and tips over at your feet, and it's HILARIOUS.)

If a new server opens tomorrow or over the weekend, there is a good chance I will be rerolling.  We'll see.  I'm trying to be patient with QueueAge, but a girl can only sit and pointedly livestream her queue for so long before it wears on her.  And it's hard as shit to come up with content for a game that I can't actually log into.  Q.Q  (#QueueQueue?)

ArcheAge Hype!

So... today was the big day.  Trion's ArcheAge went live to everyone, not just the people who bought founder packs to get into the headstart period.  Not that those people really got much mileage out of their head start, since fucking Trion's been getting cornholed with DDOS attacks and authentication server mishaps since h.s. started.  The rage on the forums is real, and there seem to be a lot of fanboys with their fingers on the game's carotid, just waiting to pronounce the game dead on arrival.

First off: this game has been way successful in Korea, and Trion is run by a bunch of fucking venture capitalists that won't let the game lose money.  So calm your tits.  I'm not saying it's not legit to get upset when you're dropped from heinous server queues, or get stuck in video loops, or whatever.  I'm just saying to calm your tits and get a little perspective.  World of Warcraft launched with day-long queues, serious server instability, and with so much client and server lag that it was pretty much unplayable for most people until two months after release.  SWTOR had queues, Rift had queues, Wildstar had queues...

It's not a new thing.  And it's not necessarily a bad thing.  Look at it this way: if the publisher opens more servers, yes.  It solves the problem immediately.  There is more room for the playerbase to settle down, everyone gets a shot at land who wants it, and the launch-day flood is able to distribute evenly.  Fast forward to a year or two down the line.  The new car smell has given way to b.o. and stale beer, and a lot of those servers are starting to feel empty.  Your newbie zones are ghost towns, because everyone's higher level, half the buildings are abandoned because the people that were so gung-ho at launch burned out or moved on.  The forums are awash with cries of doom and death...  And what are the devs to do?  They can close servers and merge the populations, but then you have to worry about handling the housing issue, and the economics of the whole thing.  Not to mention that server mergers are ALWAYS met with negative press.  Like, since E'ci and Tunare were merged back in the day and all the Zeks became one server, people start screaming death and dismay when the M word comes into play.

Yeah.  It's this whole mess.  So, rather than create tomorrow's problems today, the devs decide to keep the number of servers low, gambling that a little bit of inconvenience now will offset the disappointment and inability to grow and nurture a long-term community down the road.  That said...

I would expect Trion to open at least another two servers by midweek next week.  They've already upped the server caps by 20% (in the US, 10% in the EU).  They're acknowledging the issues and keeping the playerbase posted as they try to resolve them.

That's all you can bloody well ask for.  Now shut your pie holes, goddammit.

*cough*  Okay.

So I'm a naked newbie, playing on Enla, which is one of the newer servers.  I'm playing 100% free at the moment, so there's a lot of shit I can't do (like own property and use the auction house).  The combat so far is NOT restricted though, which is nice.  I've been playing Trickster (Archery/Shadowblade/Witchcraft) and love it to pieces.  It's a good mix of mobility, damage, and control.  Holy shit.  The bubble mez?  Is awesome.  And hilarious.  The biggest perk of the whole build so far, and keep in mind that I'm only level 13, is the instant cast root/dot after I use my reverse lunge.  I can basically root rot, if I want, by stacking my dots up and then rooting stuff.  It's not very time-efficient, but it keeps me from dying every five feet.

I cannot say that about my fellow froobs.  Jesus fuck, some of these people must need flashing lights on their desks to remind them to inhale and exhale.

I should write more, I really should, but I'm down to three minutes on my queue and I don't want to miss the pop.  I'll be playing ArcheAge on stream for the forseeable future, so come on over and check the game out. ^.^  I plan to hit PvP hard, once I'm high enough level for it, which I think starts around 30.  And apologies for the hiatus.  Some RL shit happened, which you'll be able to read about over at On the Rox later tonight or mid-day tomorrow.

Stay excellent!

On deciding what game to stream

This has been a point of constant contemplation for me since I first got the inclination to stream on Twitch.  How do I decide what (and when) to broadcast?  There are a lot of games out there, and there are thousands of people with Twitch channels, all clamoring for the same hundred odd thousand people to come watch their shows.  Twitch already has its allstar lineup of big-name streamers, and a good-sized roster of less well-known broadcasters as well.  Starting from the ground level, the whole thing can seem fucking impossible to break into.

So how to go about doing it?

Everything I've heard from other streamers when they're asked boils down to "just start your stream and be patient."  I don't buy that, because that's not how fucking marketing works.  You don't just hang a sign on your door that says "open for business" and get customers.  Oh, you might get a couple curious people, but by and large?  You're not going to become WalMart by sitting on the side of the road with a couple of cheap fucking radios that fell off the back of a truck.  You're just not.

From what I've seen, the two major factors in whether or not your viewer count goes up (and you get those all-important follwers) seem to be what you're streaming and when.  While streaming a game like World of Warcraft or League of Legends might seem super cool and fit most with how you want to be spending you time, odds are that there are a hundred people on the list ahead of you with more viewers and subs, and since that's how Twitch sorts streams...

Good luck catching clicks, when people have to scroll down through a bajillion other channels to get to you.

Picking a less widely-broadcast game is an option, a good one from what I've seen.  When I stream Diablo III, I'll go all night without collecting more than just myself and maybe a friend from Facebook.  When I was streaming ArcheAge, though, I would fluctuate from three to twenty viewers at a time, and actually collected a few follows.  I saw better progress as a broadcaster in two days of ArcheAge than I saw in two weeks of Diablo.  The key to that is that sitting in ArcheAge with three viewers put me well over halfway up the list, and as I got more clicks, I rose even higher.  Broadcasting Diablo with the same amount of viewers puts me in the fucking sewer with the motherfucking Ninja Turtles.

I've also noticed that WHEN I stream has a lot to do with how many views I can collect.  If I stream Diablo while say... Morikopa or Datmodz are live, I'm pretty much not going to pick up strays.  If I go live while there aren't a lot of high-profile streamers around, though...  Boom.  Clicks.  The market doesn't go away when the big names aren't streaming.  That's when it opens up the most.  Think of it this way: it's 2AM and you're fucking hungry as fuck, but you don't want to cook.  Fucking everything's closed, right?  Except Taco Bell.  They're fuckin' open like... ALL THE DAMN TIME.  Ordinarily, you wouldn't eat at the Bell because you don't like horsemeat or whatever, but you're fuckin' hungry, and anything you get at WalMart is gonna require getting out of your car, walking around the damn store...and you'll probably just walk out with some fucking junkfood and a case of NOS, so why the fuck bother?  Just go to the Bell, drive through, and get yourself a goddamn box of tacos.

It's like that with Twitch, too.  If I make myself available when other options are limited, people have no choice but to come check me out.  That's when having that snappy title and awesome channel graphics come into play.  If you can pique interests during offpeak times and get those follows, you'll be in a better position to climb up the watchlist come peak times.  If some dude gets shitfaced and follows you at three in the morning, when he rolls out of bed hungover and is looking for something to watch and sees you online again/still... he might just check you out instead of whoever else he's subbed to.

Or...you can show boobies.  Apparently boobies trump marketing strategy.

Anyway, I don't know if my observations mean that I should change what I'm doing 

I am not a goddamn unicorn! (Geek feminism rant)

Something has been bothering me since I started streaming more seriously.  How in the flying fuck after ten plus years of video game culture being mainstream are girls with controllers and headsets still considered unicorns?  Why are so many girls and women in this community made to feel like they're completely alien and out of place, or mythical creatures who need to be put in a zoo or museum?  (Or driven out and eradicated, as some of the more reactionary fringe groups believe.)  Why are female critics, writers, and streamers held to such different standards, and expected to both have a more intense "gamer cred" and show their tits to get ahead?

I used to rant a lot about how misrepresented women in gaming are.  The only high-profile players or streamers I've been seeing are young, attractive, and act like genki Japanese schoolgirls.  It made me angry, because I felt like all of us frumpy, ragey, middle-aged women were unwelcome in the community.  I even started to talk about the stereotypical gamer girls as somehow less skilled, less qualified, or less REAL than I am.  Which is totally the wrong thing to take away from a realization like that.  It's more important to ask why those women are portrayed that way, or feel the need to market themselves that way.  If that's how they actually are, and behaving that way or prettying themselves up before picking up a controller makes them feel happy, then I am in no position to criticize.  But my experience just in the last week makes me think that simple self-enjoyment isn't the whole story.

In the last week I've gotten two major types of feedback about my show, and they've both been enlightening.  The first group, the haters, are the most standout douchebags.  They insult my appearance, demand I show my tits, make intensely sexual comments, and do their best to detract from my commentary and broadcasting.  The second group, after lurking in the stream for a little while, remark about how refreshing it is to see a woman on cam with her stream without any pretensions to "sexing herself up," and focusing more on the game than flirtation and fluff.  While I enjoy fucking with the former group and appreciate the affirmation that I'm doing something right from the latter group...they're both rooted in the same overall mentality.

A woman on stream is not just a streamer.  She is automatically a woman streamer, and subject to an entirely different set of rules and expectations than her male colleagues.  If a male streamer makes a dick joke, people laugh.  If a female streamer makes a dick joke, chat blows up with wondering what kind of dick she likes and whether or not she'd be able to handle the in-your-dreams proportions of the commenters' wobbly bits.  This honestly came as a shock to me, because I expected that I would not be expected to show up in date attire for my stream.  Jeans and a Kingdom Hearts tshirt, hair pulled back so I don't overheat or get it caught on my headset...  I figured that would be enough.  The camera, in my mind, is just there because sometimes the facial expressions and non-verbal reactions to things ingame are just too good to miss, and can add a lot of extra entertainment to the commentary and gameplay.  I I didn't have tits or a higher-pitched voice, I think I'd be correct in assuming that.

I really don't know how to combat this problem.  My gut reaction was to institute a safe space policy on my stream, and highlight the fact that I am a streamer first and a woman second.  After the eight pm troll rush yesterday, I banned the worst offenders and made a point to mention every so often that the way I play and the things I enjoy are no different than male players and streamers.  But why do  have to constantly justify my existence, or push so hard to make people see me as more than just some less-than-impressive tits with a headset?  Or Jabba the Hutt in black glasses, as one of my troll called me.  (Got some great laughs for telling him that I wished I was as cool as Jabba, because who the fuck else in Star Wars got Leia into a slave girl outfit and on a leash?)

Prominent male streamers do not have to take PSA breaks to assure viewers that they are watching a streamer and not a Guy Gamer.  When they acknowledge their followers, subs, and donations they don't feel the need to do little dances or blow kisses or whatever.  And they're never, that I've seen, asked what it's like to be a man who plays video games or a man who streams. 

It's rare that I listen to or watch female streamers, because the amount of unicorn and yay I'm a girl that goes on bothers me a lot, but the other night Cookie was listening to Dizzykittens in bed while she was doing her end-of-stream QA, and it seemed like all of the questions she got focused on her gender, sexuality, and gamer cred.  The answers to the questions, and how the hostess tried to steer the conversation back to the games, or the process of becoming a paid streamer and building a following really made me wonder how much of the giggle show on her stream is genuine and how much of it is marketing.

I will not change the way I dress or act while playing in the name of marketing.  It's probably a terrible decision, since I am trying to turn this into a professional gig, but my integrity isn't worth giving up for some extra clicks.  I want my audience to tune in because they enjoy my company and company, not because they like the way I look or pander to them.  My influences and inspirations in streaming are probably JohnBams, Morikopa, and Ducksauce just because those are the ones Cookie watches the most and I spend a lot of time listening to them.  I strive to strike a balance between game-related commentary, comedy, and unrelated pop-culture discussions.  My favorite game while I was broadcasting ArcheAge was celebrity lookalike NPCs. 

I thought about taking the camera off my stream, so that the haters don't have any reason to hijack my chat to fulfill their need to victimize someone, but I don't want to be that woman who's afraid to speak up because she's a woman and a man might react badly.  I support retaking the night.  I support teaching people not to hate, not segregation.  Challenging the status quo is the only way to change it, and I like to think I'm strong enough to do that.

Maybe I'm taking too much of a crusader mentality about this, but I don't really care.  I'm sure I'm going to make mistakes along the way, but I'm going to try my damnedest to break away from the unicorn mentality and the generally misogynistic metagame within the community.  The heart of Tactical Dysfunction is in carving your own path to victory, and being accepting and open to other ideas and methodologies.  It was a good choice of brand, I think, and hope I can live up to it as I try to change not only others' perceptions and expectations of women in gaming but my own as well.

I promise I'll get back to actual content with the next update.  Stay dysfunctional, friends.

ArcheAge - First Impressions

So, unless you've been under a rock for the last few weeks, you already know that TrionWorlds, the publisher that brought us Rift, is set to release a brand new game on Monday.  Technically.  Since that's when head start happens.  Trion's been hyping ArcheAge as a plush sandbox MMO, where you can play your way without any penalties or having to sacrifice form for function.  They boast over 100 classes, each one a different three-part combination of their skillsets.  It offers an intense housing system, large-scale realm and guild-based PvP content, aerial travel, and even naval warfare.  As in you can become a motherfucking pirate king.

Okay, that's how it's being sold.  So far, in my HIGHLY EXPERIENCED level thirteen opinion, they're doing a decent job of delivering on their promises.  And considering the game lost a lot of potential hype to its neighboring releases (Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online, and the World of Warcraft and Rift expansions), it's actually gathered a pretty healthy community.  There seem to be sizable clusters, even in beta, of players from every major sphere of gameplay.  Hell, there are even Lineage2 style criminal guilds that focus on ganking and stealing, and anti-red police guilds that hunt them.

My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me here, but I am really excited to see the community taking a turn-of-the-century shape.  I'm one of those oldschoolers that waxes poetic about the lost days of the East Commons Tunnel, and bot-hunters, and guilds putting reputation before epeen.  I get giddy when I see a chat that's almost like vanilla Barrens chat, but with a healthy dose of pre-Dragons of Norrath Plane of Knowledge.

Ultimately, a lot of evaluation is going to have to wait until I get to spend more than five hours ingame, but so far it's looking good.  My biggest pet peeves so far are Firrans, the labor system, and only having one skill until like...level ten.  (Only a slight exaggeration.) 

Firrans are the requisite cat people, and they comprise one half of their faction.  (The other half is an ambiguously Asian race of humans.)  My biggest complaint?  The males all either look like Morpheus or like they got stung by a bunch of those bees from the Hunger Games, and the females all look like twelve year old prostitutes on speed.  And holy shit.  The run.  THE RUN.  Remember the Worgen "racial mount", where they run on all fours?  Firrans do that.  Only when the females run, their tails are held half-up like they're presenting to be mounted.  Yeeeeeah....  It's gross.  And when they swim- which, why the FUCK do so many of the cat starter zones throw you into water when, like, cats hate water- they look like goddamn dolphins.  Their hats look ridiculous, their mounts are totally cute when they're babies but look like derpy battlecats...

You get the picture.  Firrans bug me.  But wtf is the labor system? 

I'm glad you asked!  Please.  Have a seat.  This is going to be a bit of a rant.

You know how almost every Facebook and app store game has a limited "stamina" resource that determines how many missions you can run?  Labor in ArcheAge is like that, only it dictates how many dropped bags you can open, harvesting nodes you can use, and crafting combines you can do.  You generate labor at a rate of one per minute, in five minute ticks.  Being the farming whore that I am, I was harvesting every single resource node I passed, never thinking that I was burning up a limited resource.

Yeah...

So I got to the obligatory crafting introduction quest, and I had no labor.  At all.  And the combine requires a whopping fifty labor.  Fifty minutes' worth of standing around and doing nothing (or running in circles looking for quest updates that are right in front of my face, and bitching about camp stealing) to do ONE.  COMBINE.

wtf.

I know I shouldn't be that surprised.  The game is free-to-play.  It has to have restrictions to bait people into the cash shop and get them to spend money on the game.  And honestly, the price tag on labor potions isn't that high.  Maybe a dollar?  Two?  And it gives you a thousand labor.  Pretty decent exchange rate, compared to other games.  I wouldn't expect any less from Trion though.  They've done better than most other western publishers with their development of a micro/macrotransaction-based f2p system.  (Probably because the company was founded by venture capitalists, and not programmers, writers, and engineers.)  Still.  The fact that just about everything short of questing and grinding xp eats up labor bothers me.  Maybe if you generated labor while offline at a reduced rate, it would go over better, but you don' get ANY while you're logged out.  The only way to get labor points is to be logged in.

Time to get my quarter-stuck-in-keyboard and auto-run into walls in the middle of nowhere mojo on.  >.>  I haven't had to keep a character logged in with timeout cheats in like six years.

My issues with the skill system are really just a reflection of an issue I have with MMORPGs in general.  At level one, or even level ten, you have like...NO BUTTONS.  And the ones you have are very basic attacks.  In ArcheAge, this becomes sand-in-the-snatch-esque because every ability but your basic ranged and melee strikes has a cooldown.  It's like being a Crusader when Reaper of Souls first launched.  ARROW SHOT!  And...now it's time to lean on my attack button until it comes back up.  And while archery takes a 20% damage penalty for being in melee, they get no ability early-on to snare, root, reverse lunge, or otherwise gtfo melee.  Just once, I want to have access to my core abilities from level one, and develop them with complementary abilities, buffs, an debuffs over the course of my character's development.  It doesn't have to be the FINAL class toolkit, but it does have to be a complete kit.  If I'm ranged DPS, give me a snare or root, a strong ranged blast attack, a decent ranged aoe (cone or taoe, I don't care), and some kind of self-heal or mitigation cooldown.  That's all it takes.  If I'm a healer, the kit is almost the same, only you give me enough damage to be able to solo, give me a solid single target heal, and either a group heal, damage absorb, or mitigation buff.  Tanks need taunts.  Rogues need stealth or stuns.  That kind of stuff.

Maybe I'm asking for too much.  I don't know.  I would feedback all of this to Trion, but their version of ingame feedback is their knowledge base on an ingame browser.  Less-than-ideal.

Anyway.  In spite of my rambling list of peeves, I highly recommend ArcheAge.  Official live date is sometime next week, with head start beginning on Monday.  If you're curious or on the fence, drop by my stream tonight at 5pm EST.  I'll either be playing my Firran trickster, or I'll have rerolled an elf something or other because I can't take the yiffing any more.  And apologies for the missed days here on the blog.  It's been a busy week.

The WORLD (of Warcraft) IS (not) ENDING!

/09My Facebook feed has been absolutely filled with people sharing and re-sharing articles from Joystiq, LazyGamer, and a few other MMO newsy-type sites about how WoW is going free to play and the apocalypse is upon us.  Given that pretty much everyone is running (or was running, since a lot of the articles have disappeared into the ether since Blizz posted this on the WoW forums) the same story, I'm going out on a limb and assuming some overzealous retweeting happened, and then some judicious paraphrasing of articles happened.  So here's the real skinny:

World of Warcraft is not going free to play.  They are not giving new Battle.net accounts thirty days of unlimited access to pre-Pandaria Warcraft.  And they are not, that we know of right now, going to pull the rug out from under us after Draenor launches and move to a freemium model.  (That is, free to play with one or more subscription/subscription-like premium options.)  So all of you subscription or bust dinosaurs can calm your tits and get out of the way.

That's right.  I called hardcore proponents of subscription-based MMORPGs dinosaurs.  Because it's not 2010 any more, and we don't have to be afraid of the words "free," "to," and "play" any more.  I'm not going to go so far as to say that there is no future for subscription-based games, because there are still more than enough of us that prefer to just fork over a given amount of money each month to get unlimited access to a game and all of its features.  But it's hard to ignore that there is a LARGE portion of the MMO-playing community that favors an a la carte approach.  They don't want to pay for services or content until they need them.  By offering a game up as free to play (or even buy to play, depending on your price tag) a publisher immediately makes their game accessible to pretty much anyone with an internet connection and a computer.

Even Blizzard has been able to push hubris to the side enough to offer a free trial, and while that opens up a little bit of leeway for "walk-up" players.  That is, players who don't have any kind of direct initial attachment to the game or franchise, but who are looking for something new or different to try.  And it's a lot easier to drag your friends from game to game if they don't have to immediately plunk down fifty dollars or better before they even know if they're going to stay around or not.  All that said, let's face it.  Twenty levels is barely enough gameplay to figure out basic mechanics, let alone form a connection with the game.  Trials typically lock new players out of open communication, the ingame economy...

The restrictions are well-intentioned.  They keep spam to a minimum, discourage the use of trial accounts for illicit RMT, and are supposed to encourage people to purchase the game or subscribe.  Only here's what generally happens:

Fr00bie: omg this game is so awesome I can shoot and stab and RAWR!  Look!  A knife!  How do I use? 

Local: Fr00bie: how i use nife?

System Message: Error; Trial accounts cannot use local

Fr00bie: omg this game sucks I'm gonna go play FreeStabbingShootyMans Online instead.

Please, for the love of Freya, someone make an MMO called FreeStabbingShootyMans Online.

All jokes aside, the MMORPG market has been diluted in recent years by mass-produced free-to-play games on mobile and traditional platforms which offer everything from 100% free gameplay with paid "flavor" content to one-time "unlock" purchases that flag the user's account for unlimited access for all time.  A lot of old-timers scoff and demand to know how the games plan to stay afloat when they're giving everything away for free, but here's the point:

They are.  They're wildly successful.  The companies that have them make a LOT of money.  No, they don't have subscriber figures in the tens of millions, but they don't need them. I guess what I'm getting at is that a game does not need to be subscription-based to flourish, and in today's MMO industry, a sub-only model is probably a hindrance.

Look at Everquest 2.  The game was floundering, rife with retention problems and losing devs left right and center.  Then they go f2p.   There's still a sub option, and get this: players actively encourage others to subscribe, and it works.  They offer enough of the game to catch interest, and offer characters enough freedom to form the connections that will keep them in the game for a longer time.

EQ2's not a perfect example, but it's one that's near and dear to my heart.  When the players are complaining about cities feeling like ghost towns and only ever seeing the same old faces...  Opening the floodgates to the unwashed froobie masses is the best option, even if the players don't initially realize it.  The game that everyone pronounced dead two years into its lifespan, which everyone thought had been crushed under the titanic weight of World of Warcraft... is still going strong, is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and has an expansion on the way.  Maybe more importantly, it has another franchise game coming down the pipeline and a fanbase eager to play it.

World of Warcraft...has nothing but people drawing attention to its rapidly dwindling population, server mergers, and speculating that its next expansion is just going to be a waste of time and money.  WoW should have made the free-to-play leap when Cata released and hit the reset button on half the content in the game.  Blizzard should have kept the standard subscription; offered a premium subscription with perks like accelerated xp, special heirloom items, and some kind of raid lockout override; and introduced one or two tiers of free play with varying degrees of freedom.  Yes, it would have required modifications to the raid difficulty settings, and PvP queues...  But it would have been worth it.  The press and publicity could have floated the game another couple of years without some schmuck pulling out his stethoscope and trying to pronounce the game dead.

So yes.  I wish the rumors about WoW going free to play were true.  Not just because I really want to play right now but don't have the cash to sub, but because I genuinely want to see the game last.

World of Warcraft is not going free-to-play.  That was a targeted promotion.  And World of Warcraft is not dying.  It's just finally hitting an equilibrium point with the other franchises in the industry.  The game is, however, at a very important point in its lifespan, and whether or not it lasts another five or ten years is going to depend heavily on how Blizzard handles the next twelve months.

A Song of Ice and Fire (lol, sorry GRRM)

Two wizards, both alike in xp,
In third Diablo where we grind our loot...

Sorry, Shakespeare.

Okay.  Enough coat-tailing and click-pandering.

Diablo 3 season 1 is a whopping three days old, and pretty much all the good stuff has already happened.  The world firsts have come and gone (I was online and like...level 17 when the first NA T6 Malthael kill happened.  I believe I said something like "holy monkeyfuck, Cookie, we're doing it wrong"), the leaderboards are topped, and Twitter is full of screenshots of the phat lewtz people are getting from greater rifts and Greed.  It pretty much seems like in three days, I've gone from "Oh this is going to be soooooo cool" to "Welp.  Everyone else has already been there and done that...  Better than me."

Being a casual makes me sad.

But on to the titular purpose of this post: Wizard builds.

My girlfriend and I both run Wizards, and we usually duo on Torment 3 or so, because speed is good and not having to pay attention is important when you are constantly under siege by kittens.  On our non-season mains, we both run disintegrate builds, but since she's a cheating whore and has four pieces of Tal'rasha's, she runs with a four-element setup while I run pretty much exclusively arcane.  Both builds put out a LOT of damage, but my build especially lacks for survivability.  Since we just run on T3, it doesn't really matter too much, but it's the biggest thing keeping us out of higher torment levels and higher rank greater rifts.  So, being the experimentally-inclined bitch that I am...

I went all mad scientist on my seasonal wizard.  And I've had some if not surprising, at least entertaining results.

See, when I started playing Diablo, Cookie was already 70.  I pretty much modeled everything I did after how she'd built her wizard, so I only looked at one playstyle: cone-based, melee, glass cannon builds.  I basically grew up thinking of sets like frost and lightning as subpar to arcane and fire.  What little experimentation I did only narrowed my build rules even more: everything I put together had to have Energy Armor/Pinpoint Barrier, Magic Weapon/Force Weapon, and Familiar/Sparkflint.  Because crit, damage, and more damage.  That didn't leave much room in my build for mobility, debuffing, or cooldowns.  Over the last few months, Cookie and I converged on the One True Build: Three buffs, Arcane Orb/Arcane Orbit, Spectral Blade/Thrown Blades, and Disintegrate/Entropy.  Passives: Glass Cannon, Blur, Dominance, and the 15yd damage bonus.

Then the update happened, and we rerolled, and suddenly I was stuck with Magic Missile and Ray of Frost for twenty-odd levels.  I had no choice but to experiment, because let's face it- I am used to driving a Mazerati and someone dumped me in a Vibe.  Cookie's done the same thing, and we've ended up with a really fun, surprisingly beefy duo.

I'm ice.  She's fire.  Hence the title.

Everything I do is PBAOE.  I've got Ray of Frost, Ice Armor, Frost Nova, Magic Weapon, Familiar, and Spectral Blade.  She's got Blizzard/Apocalypse, Hydra/Mammoth, Energy Armor/Pinpoint, Magic Weapon, Familiar/Sparkflint, and Spectral Blade.  It's very I hold, she punches.

What I really like about the frost setup I've got right now is that everything serves to up my damage in some way.  Frost Nova debuffs mob damage taken by 30%, the ice armor aoe debuffs everything MORE with Cold Blooded, and the ray of frost storm makes everything pretty much melt.  Adding the squishier damage from Cookie's fire build, and it's taken us from having a hard time on Master to probably bumping up to Torment.  And we're level 53 right now.

Doesn't sound like a big deal, but I'm pleased with it, dammit.

I'm really excited to see what we're able to do with these characters once we hit 70.  It's funny, how two characters of the same exact class can play so differently, but my seasonal wizard is a completely different experience from my main.

I'm going to be spending my time between D3 and Champions for the foreseeable future, and you can catch me as @ScarletShrike or Roxina#1469.  Catch you ingame!

Coming soon- Scheduled content!

Wait.  You mean like deciding to post every day before 10p EST, or streaming Diablo 3 every day between 4p and 9p?  What the everloving fuck?  This is Roxi the Kleptokatt.  She doesn't organize shit like that!

Which is the best part of having a super-amazing girlfriend.  She's being understanding and supportive, and has agreed to (a) let me turn the extra bedroom into a workspace and (b) help me organize my content and actually plan things ahead for once.  I think she's partly motivated by the fact that moving all of our computer equipment upstairs and moving my old bed and stuff out of the spare room will force me to clean 90% of the house, but I'll pretend it's because she's awesome and loves me and doesn't think I'm wasting my time.

One of the biggest problems I've had in writing this blog is being consistent, and following through on story lead-ins.  I'm pretty sure I've NEVER actually written about something I said I was going to when I said I was going to.

Like SWTOR.  I had every intention of actually revisiting the game and writing a scathing rant about how one of the most anticipated and hyped games of the last five years was a complete flop.  And I was going to relate it to Wildstar's mis-start.

But instead I'm going to write a filler post, watch Noragami on Netflix (it's been ages since I picked up a new anime, but I'm REALLY liking this), and maybe stream a little Diablo.  Because Cookies is now fucking like 45 and I'm still in my 20s, because I got locked out of the house last night when I was supposed to be streaming.  That'll teach me to surprise her at work, right?  Right.

Anyway, keep an eye on the page list at the top, because I've got a few ideas in the works- build guides for Diablo and Champions, my master schedule, a photo gallery of the kitties fucking up my attempts to be leet,

(And just to prove a point: mother of fuck, it takes forever to patch SWTOR. Fuck that shit.)

An interruption from our sponsors!

No, this isn't about SWTOR, or Rift, or anything else pixelly and loot-filled.  For once.  Consider this a features update, rather than a content patch.

Last night, I had an epiphany.  Or rather, my girlfriend had an epiphany for me.

See, I just lost my job.  It's a long story, but I've got all this grown-up, real-world stuff to do so that my six game-playing, food-stealing cats get to keep their cozy home.  Only, I spent all of yesterday working on updating graphics and stuff on my YouTube channel, here on the blog, Twitch, and even Twitter.  Rather than making her an awesome dinner and cleaning the apartment so she wouldn't be mad, I greeted her at the door with my laptop in hand.  And I made her read my blogs.

And she laughed.  I was amazed.  She actually enjoyed reading what I've written.  And then she told me something that I probably should have thought about a long, long time ago.

"You should write a book.  Not like, a book about some dwarves killing some dragons and shit, but like your blog.  About YOU killing dragons and shit."  Not her exact words, because if my girlfriend swore as much as I do it'd be fucking weird, but you get the picture.  She actually encouraged me to keep writing, treat the blog like a brainstorming area for a proper book, and tackle it head-on.  (And before you guys start burning incense and lighting candles in her honor, she also made sure to remind me that I have to find income ASAP.  She's not a moron.)

I stewed on her suggestion for the rest of the night, while I plodded through Act 1 on my season wizard and fucked around with my OBS settings to get my stream running properly.  What would it take, I wondered, for me to actually pull a book off?

Ideal world, I'd need a month or two of uninterrupted writing time, money to start sending out manuscripts and find an agent, and a box of cookies. The cookies are optional, but I find they make the writing process work.  (Love, if you're reading this, yes I ate all your cookies, but it was for a good cause.)  My problem is that I can't just up and devote my life to producing a hilarious and relateable memoir.

So I figured what the hell.  I signed up for a Kickstarter, put in an estimate of expenses related to actually writing the book and making super cool special things for donators, and went through all the paperworky-type things to get my internet panhndling set up.  Seriously, I used PayPal back in the day, and I don't remember it being so time-consuming or needing so much information to set up.  -.-  Anyway, I had a hell of a time figuring out what sorts of perks to offer for donating.  It's scary, coming up with things you'll give people that relate to an unfinished project, that you've got to deliver whether you're able to market your manuscript or not.  And how do you make the perks tantilizing enough to get people to donate ten dollars instead of five, or whatever?

Everyone (on Facebook, anyway) says my kitties are adorable, and our pictures of them "helping" us play games are usually well-received.  So I figure, why not prostitute their cuteness?  Making cat videos and taking cat pictures is pretty fun, and something I can handle pretty easily.  Boom, rewards.  I like writing to people.  More rewards.  I love the sound of my own voice.  HOLY SHIT I COULD RECORD AN AUDIO BOOK AND BURN IT TO SOME CDRS OR SOMETHING.

Yeah...  I'm probably really bad at this fundraising thing, but... We'll see!  If you like what you read here, or at On The Rox, please think about clicking the donate button or contributing to my Kickstarter at the top of the page.  Thanks for reading, folks, and stay awesome.

OH!  And don't forget that I've got a Twitch stream and a Twitter account!  Because you can never have enough tactically dysfunctional, kleptomaniacal kattladies in your life.