As I mentioned in my last post, I have not been feeling WoW and after much thought and consideration I have determined what may be the root cause.  Overexposure.  I have alwasy been obsessive about things I enjoy, reading everythign I can, submerging myself in it, and WoW is no different.  I read WoW Blogs, I follow tons of WoW players on Twitter, I WoW everything and I believe that all that has added up to the point where i just get sickened sometimes.

My goal here is to not quit the game, I still enjoy playing and I still will, but I have decied to drop playtime dramatically and not stress over what I am and am not able to accomplish.  We all want the best gear, the coolest mount and we all want to get the collest achievements.  In the end you have to ask yourself what for?  In due time servers will be shut down and we will move on to the next grind.

I don’t mean for this to be a negative post although I am sure it will end up sounding that way, but you really have to ask yourself what your doing it for.  I could not come up with an answer that really drove me to continue.  All of it will be for the pure experience in the end and the only thing I’ll have to show for it will be pale skin and wrist pains.  This game has given me it’s fair share of enjoyment and with it I have met plenty of new friends as well as my future wife, so I could not have taken more from the game.

My goal at this point would be to get back to basics and play WoW for the reason I had intended in the first place to have fun and enjoy myself, not to be the leetest out there.  WoW will take a back to seat to other activites from now on, but I am far form the point of quitting, just laying off for a while.  Play some other games, get out of the apartment more, and enjoy more of a real world life.  WoW is not going anywhere soon and will be here when I decide to play.

It happens to all of us, some more then others, and sometimes there is not control to it.  It is a madness we all must face.  What do we do when we are bored of WoW.

I don’t want to come right out and say I am board and tired of WoW, I am not, I enjoy playing when I do, but I find it hard to pull myself into the long motivational process that is running an instance.  I love em but hate em at the same time.  PvP is borked thinks to lack of starter gear, so you just get demonlished everytime, and you know you cant raid until decent gear has been acquired.

My guild is still in it’s startup phase, we are recruiting for Heroics and eventually want to get onto some 10-mans, but that time is neither here nor there and until then I need to find something to do.  I log on and sit there and chat with guildies but not a instance run in sight.  My daily questing has consisted of the cooking daily and thats it.  I understand since I started working I would have less time, but the time I do have is not even spent in game.  Could I be loosing the love? Maybe just need another break, but why so soon after coming back?

I am still searching for the answers and will find out one way or the other if my love may be fading for this game.  With so many high profile people leaving the game lately you have to wonder if the reality that is setting in for so manhy people lately is the start of a trend.

Been busy at work, and with RL the past week as I have mentioned, but this little tidbit is a must post for me.

TokyoPop a manga publishing company has slated a Death Knight manga release for December of this year.  No word on the story line,  WoWinsider hasa little workup on it.  So be sure and read that.

I am not a huge manga fan, I have read some of the other Warcraft mangas out there and moderatly enjoyed them. I do hope for a much more fleshed out and enjoyable story in the Deathknight one.  I will post more info as I find it.

This is what usually happens when I decided to make regular posts.  I start off really well and get a post up every week, or every two weeks, whichever I have decided to try and set myself too.  After a few weeks RL starts to get in the way and the time I allot to posting gets pushes back and pushed back.

This week though I started a new job.  I am not doing a lot at it yet so I can not really blame having “other” stuff to do.  All I can say is I’m sorry I can not keep up with a regular posting schedule.  I will still do the column as I have a lot to say, I will just do it when time permits.  I am working on one that is about 1/4 way done, and I will try and get it completed today.

I will have a post doay wether it be Under the Helm or not.

Today Blizzard has finally released the ability to merger your World of Warcraft account with a battle.net account, which is allowing Blizzard to have one login for all of it’s games. This applies for past as well as future games including WoW and Starcraft 2. Below is quick walkthrough of what to expect.

The first step is to create or login to your battle.net account. If you have not created one yet, you will need to.

Once an account is created/logged on to, you will be given the option to merge, your existing World of Warcraft Account with your Battle.net account

Here you” enter your WoW account info.

You will be given a few warnings and notices,  including your old login information as well as what it will be once the merge is complete.

Once you hit Finalize you will be presented with alist of games registered to your Battle.net account.

It was a very seamless transition and the hardest part will be remembing to use my new login info.

This morning I woke up and checked my Analytics to see what my traffic yesterday looked like, I was out of town so wasnt able to keep up. I noticed I was getting some new traffic from wowheadlines.com. I just wanted to throw a shout out, and say thank you, and everyone should check it out. They have the site sorted by class and it looks really good.

Peace

We have all heard it. Guild’s don’t want us, Rogues give us a hard time, warriors want to be us. The phrase Deathknights are the new Hunters is a common phrase heard in Trade theses days. I suppose there is some validation towards the animosity. DK’s are a new class, and a cool class at that, so people are giving them a roll and trying them out. This means that there are a lot of DK’s and with the increase in population there is bound to be an increase in incompetent players.

I have had my fair share of players who thought because they have deathgrip they should use it to help the tank pull. I have done this once or twice but it was not on purpose and I apologized for it. All of this has grown to give Deathknights a bad rep. We are placed in a category of players who play them because they are “easy”. Me being someone who has played every class and leveled almost every class, except for my poor level 18 hunter. DK’s are no more easy then any other class. They have there own challenges and no more or less then any other class.

Is that the main reason we are hated? I can not help but feel there is some jealousy among other classes. We are, at least until 3.1 pretty OP in most respects. I am able to go into most instances and keep up with and surpass better geared classes in DPS. This is changing there are 4 years worth of class balancing to catchup on and I can promise we will here the same complaints when the next hero class is playable.

Let me start this rant by saying, I do not believe all players in WoW are idiots, jerks, imbeciles or any combination of these. I do however feel that WoW does have it’s fair share of people who would be better of learning some discipline and respect from the back side of there fathers hand. That being said, let me begin.

We recently started a new guild after we had come to terms that our previous Guild has run it’s course. I am the type of person that likes to start fresh every now and again. It took us about a week to come up with a Guild name we liked. We searched the armory to make sure nobody already had it, and to our surprise it was available. We had decided upon the name Echelon. I log in on my DK and get the Guild Charter and start spamming trade for signatures. We only had a few members left over from our old guild none of which were on to sign the charter. Not that I was not willing to wait for them, but who knows when someone is going to decide Echelon is a great Guild name.

After securing the required signatures is officially born! We secure a website at Guildlaunch and I suggest we purchase a domain name so when the time comes we can build our own site, as I am not a big fan of pre-made guild sites. Echelon-thrall.com is purchased and we decide to upgrade to the add-free version of guildlaunch. I don’t like ads on guild sites it just seems cheesy so we are willing to pay for our members to not have to see them. I also purchase a few guild bank tabs.

We regularly spam trade to help build a good player base and the members start rolling in. After a few days of recruiting I am in Howling Fjord doing some dailies and I get ready to hit my general macro when I see some recruiting macro from a guild called (notice the accent). My first instinct was not one of OMG or holy s#!t or anything negative I was really indifferent. After a little research we found that they are a much later in the evening type guild and there prospects seemed to be 25-man while we were strictly 10-man. I figured ok, they can do there thing we can do ours. Boy was I wrong.

It came all of a sudden whispers from the other guild about how we stole there name and we are trying to capitalize on there name and we have no right to it, and we had better change it. I am not going to defend my choice of guild name to them so I ignore it. Then I receive an in game mail from there GM because one of there members was attacking us in our recruitment thread on the forum. They stated that they wanted to keep it peaceful and find an easy way to avoid this suggesting we change our name because they had so much time and money invested in there’s. I explained that we did as well and we have every right to a name that was not taken when we chartered it. They accused me of being an 11 year old and said I had one week to change it or else.

I wont go into details trying to defend my position, I feel I did nothing wrong, I simply found a guild name I liked and started it. But the is the end of my rant. I opened a ticket with a GM about the issue explaining that they were harassing and I would even be willing to change the guild name just to avoid the drama. They explained they would look into the harassment and take appropriate actions and that Guild name changes are only available if it is offensive and against there rules. We cant change the name without going through the whole charter process again, which I refuse to do. There you have it. My rant for the month. /walloftext

I had originally intended to be doing my Under the Helm posts over the weekend and have them ready by Monday for posting, with the hectic weekend I had this weekend and driving all day on Saturday, I decided it would make more sense to have the post up on Tuesdays.  This gives me an extra day to work on it in instances like this.  Sometimes I do have RL interfere with WoW and blogging as anyone who has read this blog over the past month knows.

This has been a really hectic time but I will be trying to keep the posts coming.  So you can expect Under the Helm on Tuesday of every week, and I am going to work on some other regular posts to do ona  weekly or bi-weekly schedule.  I have been really itching to get back into making my little WoW Music videos, I just edit me playing wow over music I am sure most of you have seen them on youtube.

Here is an example of the first one I did.

Last night left me in quite a pickle.  After finishing my Kalu’ak dailies I found myself 60 rep away from Exalted.  Nothign I could do about it since the dailies seem to be the only rep building quests once you finish the normal quest chains in Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord and Dragonblight.

So I reluctantly gave up on hitting Exalted last night.  Then today came along and exalted was a short flight and love connection away.  I logged on flew to Howling Fjord and completed the quest gaining 2 achievements and my little pet penguin.