Lor’themar.
But I take a very…special…interest in the Blood Elves.
Dudes, you get your cleavage with almost every racial female. Let me have my pretty. This is how you get JPRG chicks like me to play WoW.
From WoWwiki: [spoiler]
[/spoiler]
The druid slaughter has to do with a plotline in the WoW novel, “The Shattering”.
I for one am appalled that Magatha turned on Cairne. Who could have seen it coming?
Oh, right, all the adventurers who found evidence of Grimtotem jerkassery and threats and attempts on Cairne’s life since the beginning of WoW.
Thanks everybody.
Once again, in the scenario I was describing, the quest mobs were appearing literally within 10 yards of the questgiver (these were attacking elementals). The players in question barely even had to move to attack the mobs as they appeared, yet were remounting after each and every kill. Not remounting to travel back to the questgiver or to the next mob, but apparently just to sit on their drakes while they waited for the next mob to appear. There was no question whatsoever of being mounted being “more efficient”. It was actually less efficient than just standing there on their feet. All I can do with something like that is speculate that they’re strangely attached to sitting on their mounts for no reason at all.
Why is it just peachy for one person to “play differently than I do” because it’s “more efficient”, but I should just go bugger myself when I complain that their “playing differently” makes my gaming experience less efficient? Your answer to this issue always seems to boil down to “All you have to do is jump through all these hoops and use target macros and zoom your camera in and move your camera angle around until you can find a way to click on the NPC. What’s the problem?”
The guy who parks his sports car sideways across multiple parking spaces isn’t “harming” me either, but if I complained about it I doubt anybody would criticize me for “casting aspersions” on people who simply like to “park differently than I do”.
In an amusing incident, I was just in SW talking to the cooking daily questgiver, and somebody landed a Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher almost on top of me, and I watched my FPS drop instantly from 30+ to about 7 from it’s fancy frosty-glowy effects. S’okay, though, I was done there and my FPS went back up as soon as I moved away.
Sure. Anyone who ran those quest chains in Vanilla would have predicted that somehow, some way, that cow would turn on the entire Bloodhoof clan and try to assert Grimtotem leadership of the Taurens. Having a small army of clan members in the Needles couldn’t hurt.
That said, the way Blizz handled this event is pretty much like making you buy Part II of a really good cliffhanger TV episode by pay-per-view. But I’m sure I’ll buy the damn book, because Blizzard’s strategy of “EAT MOAR MEDIA” is brilliantly executed.
Bastards.
At least they got the same author to write this book as did the WotLK prequel book. The other authors were excruciating to read, by and large.
I wasn’t there, so I can’t comment. All I can say is you seem to be describing a behavior that only you see. Which, IIRC, seems to have happened more than once. Also, I thought that your complaint was about them being mounted on top of the NPC? Now you appear to be bothered by them mounting up between kills or something?
I hate to play this card, but if you can’t click on an NPC that has anything fewer than a few hundred players on it, you’re doing it wrong. Someone daring to not dismount withing a twenty-yard radius of your precious NPCs isn’t preventing you from questing. It’s just interfering with your sense of aesthetics.
Parking a large mount completely on top of an NPC for the purposes of blocking it? Unacceptable. Not bothering to dismount and simply being near the NPC, so that it may be blocked from certain angles? Not a problem.
Well, I play on a PVP server, and remounting when you’re not doing anything can be a survival strategy. If you can survive a ganker’s initial onslaught, you can survive the entire fight by flying away (assuming they can’t dismount you or dot you to death, neither of which is guaranteed, buy why take unnecessary chances?).
That might be my excuse. But again, if that were the precise situation, if I were going to be idle for more than a few seconds, I would fly up. But I might easily stay mounted just to turn in quests.
Who knows why others do it? Maybe they really like how they look on their mount. Maybe they want the extra movement speed available if they want to outrun someone else to tag a mob. And if the target appears within range, it does no harm, since you’ll dismount as soon as you attack. Better safe than sorry in this competitive world.
And maybe they’re just jerks. Too bad we can’t ban jerks. But I’m not going to waste a lot of emotional involvement over a jerk. That way lies madness and road rage. No one wins. So I just take a deep breath and work around the jerk. It can be done. If it’s worth playing the game, it’s worth working around the jerks, because, as I said, the jerks will always be there, and there’s nothing you can do but deal with it one way or another.
Again, your complaints may have merit, but they risk being overbroad. Jerkface parks his mount on top of an NPC because he want to grief someone. You get mad. I park my mount on top of the NPC because I want to transact some business, but I will be flying away momentarily. Will you get mad at me? If so, that’s rather unbalanced, because there’s no ill intent. All the animus starts with you. You are the aggressor, at least in intent. Other than inconveniencing you, I’ve done you no harm, and “inconveniencing” is not an actual wrong. It’s part of the cost of living among other sovereign individuals.
The nice thing about analogies is that you can pick anything you want if it supports your argument. What if the guy isn’t driving a sports car, but a large truck, and parks “legally”. But the parking lot is small, and the truck crowds the slot, and now the slot next to it is almost unusable. Is this also an affront to your right to park?
Take that position and you risk everyone believing your core opinion is “if it inconveniences me in any way, I’m agin’ it!” :dubious:
Frame rates. Yeah, some of the effects are over the top. Still, how many FPS do you need to interact with a questgiver? If your hardware can’t tolerate the heavy graphics, maybe you should push down the image quality? If it happens with the effects of a mount in town, that’s harmless; if it happens in the middle of a graphically-intense fight, what are you going to do? 7 FPS is pretty close to guaranteeing “death by standing in fire”.
I expect it’s “behavior that fits a specific pattern”, which is (I believe) “staying mounted in various circumstances when you don’t need to be and interfering with my ability to click stuff”.
FWIW, I don’t think hyperbole is helpful. After a while, everyone is just sniping at each others’ straw men and no meaningful discussion goes on. 
But YMMV.
That said, I have to agree that even an outrageous number of mounted characters on top of an NPC is still “work-around-able”. Right before Cataclysm went live on my server, the Orgrimmar flight trainer was completely buried in mounted (land mounts, including about half a dozen mammoths) player characters all waiting feverishly to pay their 250 gold and learn to fly in the old world. I stopped counting at 40 nameplates bobbing and floating over the scene when I "shift-V"d. And yet, I could still isolate and click on the training vendor and conduct business. Yes, I had to hunt for a bit of the vendor’s leg, but I found it. I guess I like challenges. 
Yeah. I kinda worry that people who get seriously frustrated at this might have their frustration metastasize into some kind of persecution paranoia, where there is no such thing as “innocent interference” and everyone who does this is doing it solely to grief, because there’s no legitimate reason to do it.
Eh, I’ll have to throw in with Mister Rik here. It’s kind of annoying. I don’t find it super annoying to the point of rage, but I doubt that he does, either. I just find it a bit. . .well, inconsiderate would be the word I’d use for it. While one can’t really legislate that level of consideration, one can legitimately be annoyed by another’s lack of it.
That being said, it’s very easy to do it without realizing it, now that flying’s available in the cities. I’ve had at least one moment where I’ve landed on my proto drake and taken a moment to realise that, oh, yeah, I’m half on the quest giver. My solution to this is to use my Headless Horseman mount in the cities, since it’s not nearly as big (also, it looks damn good with my warlock, nevermind that it’s pretty common now).
I also understand people’s desire to show off rare or extraordinarily pretty mounts. For instance, there’s a druid on our server with the phoenix mount. He rides it everywhere. I don’t blame him. If I had that mount, and I went to do ICC, I’d be all, “Oh, hi, Tirion, I’m here to help kill the Lich King. Just hold on while I call forth my incredibly gorgeous phoenix. I got him from Kael’thas Sunstrider, you know. Well, he didn’t give it to me; I found the keys in his pocket. Anyway, I thought some fire might help kill the Lich King. Or something. Isn’t it just an amazing specimen?”
Then he’d impale me with Ashbringer. And he’d be right, because he’s Tirion Fordring.
“Inconsiderate” exactly the right word. Griefers and jerks make “inconsiderate” their byword. Most people are just thoughtlessly inconsiderate. (Yeah, that’s redundant. I like it. :D) I do my best to make allowances, and (borrowing from WikiEthics), Assume Good Faith. Or at least the absence of malice. Even stupidity is acceptable, as long as it’s temporary.
Flying mounts. Dragons, particularly. They are mechanically speaking a problem in this regard. Mounted, a character is sitting pretty high off the ground, so you have to get closer to the NPC in order to get within “clickin’ distance”. Meanwhile, there’s about half a dragon hanging in front of you, usually right through the NPC. So guaranteed, you’ll be blocking some of that guy for someone else.
Sigh. Like I said, until Blizz fixes that mechanic, so that mounts don’t count as part of the character’s “clickable” outline, I will try to be brief in how long I interfere with an NPC. And I refuse to get upset over anyone who doesn’t, because it’s simply not worth it.
I’d help him. Not that he needs the help. But I want that mount pretty badly, and I’d be gracious enough not to flaunt it, so I’m a good inheritor. I can rummage your pockets as well as I could rummage Kael’s, and I suspect your drop rate would be much better.
I mostly have that problem in Dal on Krasus Landing and in Valiance Keep on the dock and sometimes in AH, where I do cut 'em some slack simply because it’s crowded in there.
What pissed ME off is declining a duel and either having the guy or girl repeatedly ask or in one case last night on the VK dock, running back and forth at Wolk’ and Silka with her tiger, ad nauseam. So I asked her if she was having fun being an ass? (This was before the thing with “I tag it, it’s mine” and THAT dialogue).
So she asks if I’m having a bad day and at that point I hit /dnd (ignore no longer works for me, for some reason. I have everything y’all told me about how to do it written on post-its and taped to the frame of the screen but nothing works), so then she goes “live” (in white) and tells everyone how rude I’m being. Oh well. 
Q
Hey Quasi: a couple things on your auction questions.
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I think it’s possible to sort auction results by seller name. This doesn’t help if they don’t know what you’re selling, as listing the entire auction house in one go probable isn’t feasible <or possible> but if you’re just selling leather, it may be possible for someone to go to trade goods, leather, and then sort by seller. (I am double-checking right now) Ok, double-checked: Definitely do-able, so there’s an option there.
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As for hopefully-repeat buyers…how about asking them if they’d like to buy anymore at XX price and you will COD it to them instead of going through the auction house? I don’t see how there could be anything wrong with cutting out the middleman, and the COD option in the mail keeps both sides safe, win/win. And if you notice the same person buying from you more than once, I don’t see how an innocuous, polite ingame mail offer would offend anyone. Just let them know that if they “delete it or don’t respond, you won’t bother them again, thank you and have a nice day” kind of thing.
Lord knows I c ould use someone like that for Frostweave right now, ugh.
Thanks, Tao! I’ll give that a shot when I return to Alex.
At present, I’m in Cairne starting off my new Belf Hunter, Usumbij.
Interesting. I have never had a pet before and I now have this flying lobster thing whose name is Dragonhawk, and little feller just jumps right in after we shoot and starts fighting. I think that if I don’t join in the fray, though, the thing we’re fighting would win, yes?
You’re not on Alex, Tao, are you, because I also farm Frostweave. I go to Gundrak and Vanguard in Icecrown for that.
Thanks
Q
Apologies, I was describing two separate things which you appear to have conflated, which I’ll admit is probably my fault for describing both scenarios back-to-back and having both involve large mounts (and I sort of loosely tied the two things together my own self). I’ll try to separate them more clearly:
Scenario #1: NPC “Blocking”, which indeed frustrates me, whether it’s done deliberately or not. The way you describe your own way of doing it actually sounds different from what I see on my main server (and maybe it just is Lightbringer, and you’ve just been fortunate to play on servers where people don’t do this). Your description sounds like you ride up/land next to the NPC, do your business, and move on. I actually don’t have much problem with that. What I’m seeing is people who ride up/land next to the NPC and then sit there and sit there and sit there. Seriously, it doesn’t take 5 minutes to talk to the Fishing Daily questgiver in Stormwind. Also, the tag <Away> in front of the character’s name is usually a giveaway.
Scenario #2: “Obsessive” mount-sitting, which I merely find baffling and somewhat amusing, and to which I was simply attempting to apply a bit of amateur psychoanalysis (the stuff about “legitimacy”). It stands out to me because it’s almost entirely done (at least on my server) by people with “epic” mounts. I don’t often see people on their basic racial mounts sitting unmoving in the middle of the bridge in front of the Ironforge AH or in the doorway of the Dalaran bank.
When the mounts are 4x-5x the size of the NPC, it doesn’t take more than a handful of them to mostly obscure the NPC, especially when they have the NPC completely surrounded. Hell, a single male tauren or draenei can obscure an NPC even without a mount. It’s really more of an issue when it’s an unfamiliar NPC that I haven’t seen before and so I don’t know exactly where he is (in this case, NPCs in Hyjal). There’s a yellow “!” on my minimap, but that only gets me in the general vicinity; when that entire vicinity is a mass of extra-large mounts and flapping wings, it is honestly very difficult for me to find the NPC.
Some NPCs are only approachable from those certain angles due to their proximity to walls and other fixed objects, but yeah.
As I replied to SFG above, no, I’m talking about the people who, for whatever reason, sit for several minutes in front of/on top of the NPC.
No. I can tell the difference between the truck driver’s “I did my best, but, well, this thing’s big” and the sportscar driver’s arrogant, “I’ll park how I please because my ride is so awesome that it entitles me to park like a jerk.” Though I have grumbled about the way I can park between two motorcycles, and when I come back out of the store the motorcycles will have been replaced by a Suburban on one side and an Escalade on the other, and now I can’t see a thing (except directly behind me) when I back out of my spot. It’s a conspiracy!
Sometimes, people (me, in this case) just want to vent, hopefully to at least a few sympathetic ears. Blowing off steam on a forum is, IMO, much better than letting it build up until I snap and turn into a raging asshole in-game. Ever been at work, and you and some coworkers are bellyaching about some aspect of the job or some jerk customer? I believe this is healthy - it relieves the stress in a relatively harmless way.
Me: "God, don’t you hate when blah blah blah?
Coworker: “Yeah, man, I hate that!”
Me: “Cool. All right, back at it.”
Coworker: “Let’s do it.”
And then you get a manager who doesn’t grasp this concept, and overhears the complaints and decides it’s time for a stern lecture about how important our customers are to us and if we didn’t have any customers the business would go under and then I wouldn’t have a paycheck and blah blah blah blah blah. Apparently it would be better for the employees to just put a lid on it and let it build up until they turn to drugs and alcohol, or maybe show up to work one day with a semiautomatic rifle and a whole bunch of ammo.
But I just wonder why, each time I gripe about something in the game that bugs me, SFG immediately responds as if I’m making a personal attack on her style of play.
Eh, I don’t raid so I can’t speak to what happens in those situations, but in WotLK dungeons, only HoL has ever given me any trouble graphically, though I don’t know why that is. I go in there and even with everything turned down my FPS sits around 14-15. I just thought it was funny that this single Frostbrood Destroyer had enough going on to instantly squash my FPS like that.
You’ll get better control over your pet when you hit lvl 10. Right now, the pet is yours, but it’s doing its own thing. At lvl 10, you get to start giving it commands like “Attack that thing over there” or “Move over here” or “Don’t attack at all…I’m just going to shoot by myself”.
Depending on your pet, you may want it to tank for you. You can (at lvl 10) make it attack a mob, let it get aggro, then start shooting to kill it. A hunter is a DPS class, with an auxiliary tank/extra DPS/etc, depending on the type of pet.
Complaint from the Guild Master (well… Guild Mistress actually) last night as she quested in Hyjal: “80 frickin levels of adventuring and I have to rescue bunnies and squirrels?!” Followed by various comments about the slipperiness of the critters. And then she got the follow on quest. 
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. It’s a pity that “time served” has no bearing… I’ve been in the same guild since starting playing WoW a few months before BC. 
snarf Yes, same GM was not happy to find that she’s “Recruit of Utu”, after being GM for… umm… when did BC come out? Not long after that.
Woot! 
/hug Thank you SFG!
Wow! Looking forward to that, jayjay. I’ve always envied folks who ran around with a pet, and now I’m one of 'em!
My new toon on Cairne (Sunstrider Isle) got his first real compliment as a new level 6 from Magister Jaronis, who told him, “I am pleased to discover that you’re at least somewhat competent, Usumbij.”
Thanks
Q
Ding! 85 
Now to start running those dungeons and working on professions.
Then I get to do it all over again!
Dayum, Shin! Grats!
Q