For the last time, you were not recruited by the Star Leauge for any purpose whatsoever

Once upon a time, when MAX_LEVEL was a lot lower and most of the areas still had that fresh-from-the-factory smell, World of Warcraft was designed in a completely different way.

Those of you joining the WoW party late may be surprised-cum-horrified to learn that furiously headbutting each other and being in an instance (AND ONLY IN INSTANCES OR YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME!!!1!) all day wasn't the original design intent.

If you'd put down your $49.99 for the box at CompUSA, you already knew that from the back copy:

"A World Awaits... Embark on Epic Quests... Engage an Ever-Changing World... Indulge in Seamless Beauty..." "Play solo or enlist fellow heroes to join forces with you as you negotiate the vast, battle-scarred landscape of a world at war."

And that's what it was like. A giant world and if you wanted, as an option, you could get together with people you knew and form a guild for the fun of it, or find 40(!) people and go die in funny ways under a mountain somewhere.  But it was optional.

Take an archive stroll through the patch logs and you can actually draw a physical line at the point where the management shift occurred and the design philosophy became, The point of the game is to acquire the stuff we say is cool. That's it. And you will damned well belong to a guild huge guild full of strangers to do it, too.

Ergo: guilds are only cool if they contain massive numbers of members, all contributing to the vault they will never have access to and the perks they'll be /gkicked before they can utilize effectively. So they're hoovering up every single person they can find to contribute to the guild experience total.

I bet that never comes back to bite them in the ass. Nosiree. Never.

Which brings me to guild recruiting. A Watch Constable sees a lot of it. And believe me, it's hard to keep the bile and/or laughter to ourselves.

Blizzard has provided two channels and soon an entire UI for folks either looking for or trying to trick people into find people to join a guild. These methods are roundly ignored in favor of going to the starting areas in their most ridiculous tier gear and using /shout or a macro that spams /general every few minutes to attract people who're starting new characters into their endgame raiding guild.

Let me draw a line under that. They are skipping the places people of the right level would be, and the channels which have people on them looking for guilds, in favor of going to the starting areas to try and look impressive as possible in a place where 85% of them are already in a guild.

A bigger guild.

At least, a smarter guild.

And they're probably not doing that dance.

That's the other thing. Even the (few) guilds worth being in I am pretty sure have absolutely no idea what their recruiters actually do. Realistically, if you just installed the game, your first chance meeting when you rock up on Wyrmrest Accord is probably going to be someone named something like "Sykokilla" in a loincloth attempting to hump your face and asking if you want to "join mi gild".

His guild is inevitably named "Paragons of Pure Virtue."

I bet that never comes back to bite them in the ass. Nosiree. Never.


So your recruiters are spending the majority of their time doing one of two things:

• Humping people in the face who already live here.
• Spamming their guild recruiting macro on a taxi while en route between Lakeshire and Westfall.

Just in case there was a question, that's why we just can't take you seriously.

Coming Out of the Closet...With An Arm Full of Linen Cloth

The Watch runs on the "goodwill of the community", which is a lot of words for "all that stuff we give away? Yeah, that doesn't belong to us." I may be in a unique position in that nothing in the guild bank (we call it "The Donation Bin") belongs to any of us, with a few exceptions; almost all of it is seconded from guilds and individuals on the servers we operate on. That includes the operating funds.

Some nice soul on WRA donated enough heavy leather that some very small people can have some 10-slot bags when they show up. My problem is where to put it all.


See, here's how the Donation Bin works.


In theory, each Ward has a vault with 3 tabs, divvied up into matterials & misc, armor, weapons, and our own miscellaneous stuff (uniform shirts for example). And it generally works that way until someone who's been with us for a while takes off. Then it fills up with whatever they were carrying around.

This happened recently - we lost a long-serving corporal to the allure of Cataclysm raiding - and now there's about 16 stacks of ammunition I need to clean out, low-level leather armour, and all sorts of things I suppose I could throw into rotating storage if I was on the ball enough to remember it was there. It's like that one drawer in your kitchen. The Donation Bin kind of...accumulates...stuff....and then one day you open it up and wonder When the hell did we start storing thousands of rubber bands?

It wouldn't be so bad if there were either more boots on the ground or more actual new players. Of the five I attended last night, one was a multibox bot, one was a leveling alt who immediately put me on ignore (which is pretty common) , and the rest were guild re-rolls or other natives taking small mages out for a test drive.

Try that, by the way. It's cathartic. You absolutely can not run out of mana. Seriously. Set fire to level-appropriate monsters to your heart's content until level 15 or so. And then...well, reality sets in. :/

So. Anyone got a use for about 8,000 crafted light shot?

Mops

"Members of the Public", a term of dread for anyone who's ever had to actually deal with the public. For us, this can mean anything from yesterday's level 5 hunter doing a guild re-roll to (more often) the guy on the largest mount he owns trying to strategically park himself in such a way that the new kids can't get at their questgivers.


This line of thought pops into my head every time I sneak a look at the official Blizzard forums during a break at my real job.

In theory, the forums represent lively discussion and debate between the players of the game about game issues, and represent a cross-section of what each server community is like and what you can expect if you park there.

Of course, in practice, most World of Warcraft players - despite the recent change in target audience - are people like me. That is, grown-ups with jobs who don't have infinite time to sit around and flood the forums with cries for attention. Pretty quickly, in the absence of any real moderation, the forums are overrun by Mother's Little Darlings who do and say whatever they please; a vocal, quasi-illiterate and nasty bunch who make the servers look like the West Bank on Free Gun Day. The upshot of this is that the tone of the forums bears little or no relation to the actual tone of the server it represents.

Oh, some communities try to "take back" their forums, but they run quickly up against the limitation of time: while the rest of us can only check in once or twice a day, they can be on almost continuously. They learn fast you can't win a battle under those conditions, and are snowed under.

Most servers that have not turned into Thunderdome have created their own, moderated, sites for conversation. This works out better in the long run.

Happily, today I only see the usual suspects on the two realms I now follow: guilds begging for new members, one girl who's skipped across three servers in the last 6 months (making the same posts each time, trying to "get something started"), and one girl who is really, really trying to get attention for being part of the LBGT community.

On the internet. Which is kind of like trying to get attention for being ginger in Ireland.

One girl on the test realm form suggests the /ignoreguild command, which would make my life soooo much easier some days. or at least quieter. But I know due to current policy it'll never happen.

I can dream.

Now you're thinking without portals!

This is stuck in my mind because, going back over the incident book from last night, I'm reminded that one of the five "hits" I attended last night, one was a kid completely new to World of Warcraft who was on a trial account. Of course, we didn't work that out until I had schleped all the way from EL to TD. It's not his fault - he's not to have known - but still....

I know why the transport portals were removed from Dalaran and Shattrath - the marketing reason, not the weasel-y "official" reason - and it's not only cheap and insulting, it makes our jobs when we're minimum crewed about 10x harder.

I book on tonight and realize after looking at all five LEASes that, *groan*, I'll be starting in Elwynn Forest again. A cursory glance at the list for EL tells me that it's mostly rerolls or off-server visitors; the lack of blatantly racist character names is a broad hint that somewhere, the battlegrounds haven't quite let out yet.

A word about what your kids are doing while they're logged in and under no one's supervision: mainly, they log in to essentially pound on people who can't fight back or are smaller than they are. When that fails, they roll characters with names like "Pimpkilla" and "Nigascantswim" on an RP server and starts screaming racist epithets. You'll be happy to know that they're honing their social skills while doing so because they always appear in groups of no less than 3, so they're learning the important skill of forming relationships based on common interests. Blizzard takes an enlightened view of this behavior and has hired at least 4 GMs to deal with this sort of thing on their 226 servers. I have outstanding tickets older than some of the offenders.

Wednesday is normally a slack day for mother's little darlings anyway, owing to the fact that it's the first day after rollover and their need for revenge against Billy in homeroom for stuffing them into a locker is being directed against an arena team or raid boss instead of (in no particular order) ethnic groups, women, anyone listening to any channel anywhere, and me.

The LEAS for EL includes a suspicious number of level 1s, which I imagine I'll find in the inn in Goldshire or arrayed around the edge of the lake; I'll have to see once I get settled in.