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.