By Chastity, on September 1st, 2010
So a couple of days ago Wulfy wrote a post about Atheism in Azeroth which got me thinking.
It’s kind of received wisdom in Ye Traditionalle Fantasy Worlde that there are no atheists, because being an atheist means denying the existence of God or the Gods, and in a fantasy world they provably exist.
As Wulfy points out, that’s not entirely true not least because atheism does not necessarily require you to believe that there are no Gods, only that you shouldn’t worship them. In this respect our perception of atheism is coloured by the modern world, in which the majority of atheists do literally believe that God does not exist (but then again, so do some Christians – there’s a reasonable number of people who are actually active within the Church of England who believe that while Christian teachings are correct and a good basis for morality, the actual supernatural underpinnings should be taken as allegory).
What is an Atheist Anyway?
A holy man was once asked: “What is it, more than anything else, that binds all of the world’s many faiths together. What principles do they share. What, oh wise one, makes something a religion?”
The holy man thought for a while and then said: “Singing.”
The truth is that it is very hard to define a religion, or the absence thereof. A very, very naïve definition of “atheism” is “not believing in the God of Abraham” but that definition would include Hindus, Wiccans and (if you believe certain fringe elements of the Baptist community) Roman Catholics.
You could expand your definition of “atheism” to mean “not believing in a God or Gods” but again that causes problems. Firstly there’s the thorny issue of Buddhism, because while Gods do exist within some areas of Buddhist philosophy, they’re seldom central to it. Secondly, the truth is that it’s quite hard to define what a “God” even is. Does ancestor worship count? Are the kami of Shintoism “Gods” or are they something else? And if they’re not gods, does that make Shintoists atheists? What about people who believe in fate, or luck, or are nebulously superstitious? What about people who believe in positive thinking?
When you get right down to it a religion is a shared cultural notion which contains an element of ritual (and often involves singing). It often, but not always, contains elements of the supernatural.
Of course it would be relatively straightforward in the real world to define religion in terms of belief in the supernatural. It would be a bit of an oversimplification but since what we’re mostly concerned with here is atheism, it’s not too much of a stretch. I don’t think many people would argue that you could be an atheist and still believe in reincarnation (at least not without applying argument from etymology).
In a fantasy setting it all gets a bit more messed up. What, after all, counts as “supernatural” in a world where aliens regularly invade your planet through glowing portals, and resurrecting the dead is easier than riding a horse?
Today We Can Implement the Same Functionality With Data-Mining Algorithms
The big argument against Atheism in a fantasy setting tends to be the fact that serving the Gods gives you real supernatural powers.
Except that in Azeroth everything gives you real supernatural powers. I mean seriously everything. Being sufficiently sneaky allows you to teleport. Being sufficiently good at fighting allows you to create actual thunderbolts which come Cataclysm will actually hang around on the floor in a little field of electric death. Or at least electric mild irritation.
Magic in Azeroth relies on using “mana” (which it is worth noting is used by every spellcasting class, restored by the same potions, and drained by the same spells) to manipulate natural forces. Mages manipulate Fire, Frost and the Arcane. Warlocks manipulate Fire and Shadow. Druids manipulate Nature and the Arcane. Shamans manipulate Fire, Frost and Nature. Priests manipulate Shadow and the Holy Light. Paladins manipulate the Holy Light and nothing else.
There is no particular reason to view the Holy Light as an intrinsically more spiritual or more worthy of worship than any other source of mystical energy. Indeed in early Burning Crusade, there was a lot of evidence that that is exactly what the Holy Light was – Blood Elf Paladins drew their power from a captured Naaru by strength of will, essentially deriving their powers from raw alien juice. Of course it turned out that Mu’ru was in on it all along and blah blah the light cannot exist without the shadow blah blah Sunwell blah blah but even now, the Blood Elf Priests and Paladins are getting their power not from their religious devotion to the Light, but from the Sunwell which has always been nothing more than a source of magical power.
From a certain point of view, worshipping the Light makes no more sense than worshipping fire.
When Somebody Asks If You’re a God, You Say Yes
Like many people, I have a favourite rebuttal to the ontological argument.
Put forth by a mathematician, the rebuttal simply goes: Accepting this definition of God, it is logically necessary that all Gods exist. It is does not, however, show that at least one God exists.
People tend to take the existence of real, actual Gods as evidence that people should believe in them, but this is because people assume that the only criterion for rejecting the existence of a God is to deny the reality of a specific entity, when often it is enough to deny their divinity. That is to say, to deny that there is any reason to treat them differently to anything else of a similar type.
The simplest real world example of this is Jesus. Most people accept that Jesus was probably a real person. Christians believe that Jesus was literally the son of God (or God the Son, depending on how deep you want to go into the theology of it). Muslims believe that he was a prophet. A lot of secular humanists believe he was a dude with some good ideas. Atheists believe he was just some guy. Believing that Jesus was a real person is in no way incompatible with Atheism.
One of the things which I think Azeroth does really well is not get too hung up in distinguishing “Gods” from other beings. It’s not like D&D where a “God” can be clearly and unambiguously defined (in 3rd edition at least, it’s something with a Divine Rank of greater than zero, and which has the power to grant Divine Spellcasting to Clerics).
The World of Warcraft is full of powerful, immortal creatures which are often worshipped as Gods and often treated like Gods – some of them are even called Gods but you can’t say that any of them really “are” Gods in the sense of that being an innate, undeniable part of their identity.
Indeed a lot of the beings worshipped as Gods on Azeroth are fairly clearly not Gods at all. The Elemental Lords are elementals. Deathwing is a dragon. Arthas was – well that one’s complicated but he’s a Death Knight fused with the soul of an Orcish Shaman, instilled with the power of the Burning Legion. Then there’s the Angels (the Naaru) and Demons (the Burning Legion) both of which, while they have trappings of Judeo-Christian religious icons, are pretty clearly space aliens from space.
The only things in the game which are canonically described as “Gods” are the “Old Gods” and they’re basically icky psychic tentacle parasites. And of course they have strong Lovecraftian influences, and you can make a case for Cthulhu and his ilk actually being strongly Atheist figures – embodying the idea that there is nothing out there but a vast, impersonal universe, cold and uncaring.
So you might argue that far from being an aberration in Azeroth, Atheism is practically the default. From a certain point of view, WoW is set a world where powerful monsters roam the galaxy, and get worshipped as gods by people who don’t know any better.
Until twenty-five guys get together and pwn them.
By Tamarind, on August 29th, 2010
We’re all used to seeing Azeroth as a world of high fantasy and mythic adventure.
What we tend to forget is that it can also be a world of … epic romance!
Coincidentally, we recently uncovered a selection of the works of Thunderbluff’s most prolific and best selling romance novelist, Isadora Grimtotem.
And, finally, we present this not uncontroversial cinematic offering from the Undercity Film Festival:
This post would have been in no way possible without the input and hard work of, err, other people. So many thanks to Chas for his slightly creepy habit of playing mainly female belves in pretty frocks, to Ahost for cuddling up to me on Red Cloud Mesa, and Naofa for posing in his blood knight tabard (and only his blood knight tabard) in the middle of Silvermoon City on a Saturday afternoon.
But mainly massive massive thanks to Issy who did ALL the arty stuff (i.e. all the work).
Finally a couple of out-takes:
 Dude, where's my kodo?  I'm too sexy for my tabard  Booooooooobz......
By Chastity, on August 26th, 2010
So yesterday I wrote a post about men in WoW and in life in general.
Thanks to everybody who replied, I’m deeply flattered by all of the positive attention it’s received, and all your comments have been extremely supportive, but there have been one or two themes running through the comments which I think need to address.
This one’s going to go into a bit more detail about issues of rape, so y’know, trigger warnings and that.
A trend I’ve noticed in the comments is the notion that discrimination against women and discrimination against some sorts of men somehow “cancel out” – that the fact that I feel unrepresented by male avatars and NPCs somehow balances the fact that many women feel unrepresented by female avatars and NPCs. That was very much not my intent, and I thought I would look at this in more detail and explain why I think it’s very important not to go from “patriarchy hurts men too” to “there is no patriarchy”.
The Fairy Princess Effect
The default fantasy heroine is a plucky princess who runs away from an arranged marriage, and falls in love with a swineherd or whatever. There is almost always a speech at some point about how ironic it is that although they live in luxury and are given everything they could conceivably want, they never the less do not have the freedom that the simple peasants enjoy.
Because, y’know, peasants in the middle ages all married for love.
Point being, no matter what your situation, there are some drawbacks. If somebody came up to me tomorrow and gave me ten million pounds, it would cause me some problems – I’d have taxes to deal with, it would change my lifestyle in ways I might not be prepared for, I’d have people trying to scam me and swindle me and suddenly find myself wondering if all of my friends only hung out with me for my money.
But that wouldn’t change the fact that I’d be ten million pounds better off than a whole lot of people.
Nothing in life is free. A position of power and privilege had drawbacks, but those drawbacks do not change the fact that it is still a position of power and privilege. I can’t help but feel that a lot of people seem to have interpreted what I saw as a post about ways in which discrimination against women has negative consequences for men as a post about ways in which men are disadvantaged relative to women.
This, for what it’s worth, is why I don’t like the term “kyriarchy.” Apart from a general distaste for neologisims, I dislike the alienness of the term. The patriarchy is something which men have to accept that they are part of (and which many men get deeply offended by the suggestion that they might be part of) whereas the “kyriarchy” sounds like something which we can all comfortably position ourselves outside.
As came through very strongly in my last post, and the reaction to it, geeky men very often feel rather alienated from conventional notions of masculinity, and are in many ways harmed by them. Unfortunately there’s a tendency to take this a step further and assume that this sense of alienation somehow absolves geek men of having to worry about gender issues.
Idealized != Sexualized
One of the major things I talked about in the original post was the way in which male body-types in WoW are absurdly overmasculinized, and are not necessarily representative of either the bodies or the desires of male players. A couple of people took this as evidence that male characters in WoW were sexualised in the same way that female characters are. This simply isn’t true.
Male characters in WoW are designed to appeal to the fantasies of a conventional male audience. My desires aside, there’s a lot of guys who absolutely do want their video-game avatar to look like He-Man, and these men are well catered for. No consideration whatsoever is given to designing male NPCs that women would find sexually attractive. That isn’t any part of the function of a male character in a video game.
If male characters were sexualised in the same way as female characters, they’d all be stripped to the waist at all times. They’d all have the butt-cheeks cut out of their armour, and skin-tight leg armour which is cut very specifically to draw attention to their massive bulging packages.
They’re not.
Now I would add that female avatars in WoW are actually pretty well done – they represent a variety of body types, and they genuinely did modify them on the basis of feedback from actual women, and there’s a lot less overt sexualization of female characters in WoW than in some games but there is still a fundamental difference between “designed to look really powerful” and “designed to look really fuckable”.
It is absolutely legitimate to say that the portrayal of men in WoW is problematic, but this does not change the fact that the portrayal of women in WoW is problematic in different and arguably more serious ways.
Every time somebody brings up the fact that female characters in video games are designed primarily as a male sex-fantasy, with the option for women to identify with those characters being a dim afterthought (and again, I recognize that WoW is ahead of the curve in some ways here) somebody always brings up the fact that “the men are idealised too!” What I hoped to do with my post was to highlight the fact that it was possible to have a sensible discussion about representation of men without it taking over the discussion about representation of women.
Representation Matters
Another slightly difficult discussion I got into in the comments was about representation of female characters in positions of power, in particular about the question of whether the new Goblin Trade-Prince could or should have been female.
Just to avoid doing the “some people said” thing I’ll say specifically that this was a conversation between me, Tchann and Larisa, and was mostly just an amicable difference of opinion (Tchann broadly believes that Blizzard’s main priority should be telling the story the best way they know how to tell it, whereas I think they’ve got at least some duty to make certain that their stories reflect their player base).
So yeah, I would have really liked to have seen a female trade prince. It would have been a major step forward for the representation of women in the game, not only because it would have raised the number of female faction leaders to a cataclysmic thirty percent, but because it would have been a major female character that was not some variation on evil seductress or virtuous healer. Having a female character who was a shrewd, covetous, grasping goblin would have been ten kinds of awesome because it would have genuinely challenged stereotypes.
I was casting around for reasons why representation in the game matters when I came across this post from Adam at the Noisy Rogue, in which he expresses surprise that women expect to be represented in their own damned hobbies saying:
If you are a girl, and you choose to play in it, then great. I’m very happy for you and I hope you have fun. But don’t start crowing about femisnism and sexism and any other ism that gets your knickers in a knot. When I was at school I was openly made fun of by the girls for playing these games. Now twenty years later girls are getting worked up about the fact that those same games don’t have enough female representation in them? Give me a fucking break.
Or to put it another way: “If you wanted me to treat you like a human being you should have fucked me in high school.”
Now Adam isn’t a bad guy [Edit: sorry that should read "Adam is a complete bigot - I particularly like the bit where he suggests with horror the notion that if you start listening to *women* you might eventually start having to listen to *gay people* and then where would it end], and I’m sure that’s not how he meant to come across but it’s basically what he said, and it’s a depressingly common sentiment from male geeks. Sorry girls, you had your chance when I was sixteen, and now we’re going to punish your entire sex because I didn’t get the prom date I wanted.
You see this is a fantasy game, and that means it’s about escapism. Feminism is a real world idea, when people play a fantasy game they want to be able to get away from all the stuff that upsets them in real life. Like women, and the way they keep running their mouths all the time and don’t know their place. Or gay people, because seriously I don’t want to have people grossing me out in my free time. Or black people, because I’m sorry Conan was a white man, like Jesus. You can all play the game if you want, but just don’t be in my face about it. I play this game to relax and I can’t relax if you people keep, y’know, existing at me. What? Look: If you want a “politically correct” game with women and queers and blacks in it, you go make one. Straight white men do it, why can’t you guys.
I mean seriously what’s wrong with this country, when women expect to be treated the same as men just because they’re women. I’m sorry, but actually I think that’s the most sexist thing of all – women expecting us to treat them the same way we treat men because of their sex. If you were really interested in equality you wouldn’t care if we discriminated against you, because it would be the same as if we were discriminating against ourselves.
And by the way, why is nobody talking about men’s issues.
Sorry, that got long but yeah. That’s why I think representation matters.
The Sexual Offences Bill (Scotland)
Start talking about issues of gender, violence, and sexual violence, and you invariably wind up talking about rape culture.
Start talking about rape culture and you’re very likely to get somebody telling you that “men get raped too!” like this somehow changes everything and nobody’s ever thought of it before.
Something that this particular branch of discussion brought to my attention was the Sexual Offences Bill (Scotland) which I believe has not actually passed into law at time of writing, but has been on the books since 2008.
The Sexual Offences Bill (Scotland) is designed to overturn some major flaws in the way Scottish law handles rape and sexual assault. The position of rape and sexual assault under Scottish law was presented to me as evidence of one of the ways society discriminates against men, and as evidence that rape culture is a myth.
Ten seconds on Google gave me the actual contents of the bill, and what it actually highlights very clearly is some of the ways in which discrimination against women can get so bad that it becomes harmful to men as well.
The flaws in existing Scots rape legislation were twofold. Firstly, “rape” was defined extremely narrowly as a man penetrating a woman’s vagina with his penis, without her consent. Secondly, that “consent” in Scots law was defined particularly loosely, requiring only that a man believe the victim consented, and with no requirement that this belief be “reasonable” – only that it not be “reckless.”
There’s so much wrong with this that I barely know where to begin, but broadly speaking, the problem with the law as it stood was that it seemed to treat rape as a form of property damage. Very serious property damage, of course, but still property damage. The notion that rape requires a penis to penetrate a vagina is deeply bound up in notions of feminine virtue, and masculine entitlement, it is based entirely on the idea that raping a woman ruins her for other men, that it emasculates her husband or future husband. Non-vaginal penetration has no such issues and therefore constitutes a lesser crime (indecent assault).
This is a law which discriminates against women so much that it ceases to treat them as legal agents at all, treating them instead as objects upon whom a crime can be committed, the chief victims of which are other men. Sort of like a car stereo or a shop window.
Of course a consequence of this law reducing women to the status of inanimate objects is that a woman can never be convicted of rape either. This is apparently evidence that the law unfairly discriminates in favour of women in rape cases.
I know.
Does this law harm male victims of rape? Of course it does. It also harms female victims of rape. It’s a shitty law, but it doesn’t discriminate against men, it simply has negative consequences for men.
People persist in the belief that the moment you can provide a single, solitary example of a situation in which being a woman is more convenient than being a man, that this is proof that there is no longer any inequality between the sexes whatsoever (or that things have gone “too far the other way”) this is and always has been nonsense.
Do bad things happen to men? Of course they do, it would be completely ludicrous to suggest that every single man in the world has a better life than every single woman in the world, and if feminist theory relied on that assumption it would be rationally unsupportable. But it doesn’t.
Discrimination against women is harmful to men, discrimination against men (which does exist, particularly in areas to do with childcare and the more nurturing professions – Miss Medicina gives some good examples) is harmful to women. It’s important to realize that the harm caused to one sex by discrimination against the other does not somehow negate the original discrimination.
By Chastity, on August 25th, 2010
So there’s been another spike in feminist commentary in the Blogsphere, which recently wound up with Pewter putting up an open post in order to address Men’s Issues.
As one might expect, the comments on the original post are a mixed bag, one part people genuinely engaging with the concept and one part “wah wah nobody understands how hard it is to be a straight white man, stop telling me I have privilege!”
So I was going to comment, but things got rather long and rambly, so I thought I’d post something here instead.
So this is about being a man in WoW, and in gaming in general. I should probably say at the start that this starts out quite silly and lighthearted but then takes a sharp turn into talking about rape culture and victim blaming, just a heads up for those who might find that sort of thing triggering.
Why I Play Girls
With very, very few exceptions I don’t play male characters in WoW. Of course I like to pretend that the reason for this is, hur hur, looking at my character’s arse all day, hur hur, I AM TOTALLY NOT GAY hur hur.
But actually it’s not about that at all, it’s about body image.
I decided to start this post with an experiment. I decided to try to create a character which I thought looked like me. Taking the most obvious starting point, I decided to go with a human.
 Man that's a stupid outfit. Okay, where to begin. For a start that guy’s neck is thicker than his head. His forearms are as thick as his thighs. Not only do I not look like that, I have no desire to look like that ever. Also dude, what’s with those boots. Of course I shouldn’t be complaining really, I can’t imagine how much harder this would be if I wasn’t white.
Okay, so, next try. Well we all know that if you’re after a male avatar who’s a bit less macho, a bit less hypermuscular, you should go for a Blood Elf. Right?
 I've got to admit, I dig those pants Okay, okay, looking a bit better I’ll admit. Nice cheekbones, good hair (bit lighter than mine but you can’t have everything. And his wrists are actually thinner than his legs so y’know, all to the good. At least there’s one race in the game where I can roll a male toon without being stuck with this stupid, hypermasculinized muscleman.
 Time to break out ... the guns Okay, maybe not then. (I had to make a macro to get him to do the /flex animation while my UI was hidden, I am so proud of myself).
Here’s a second picture of this character, with some annotations.
 Why yes, they are the same size And just to remind you guys, these are the nancy sissy girly boys of Warcraft. These are the guys who everybody everybody insists are weak wussy spindly little bags of twigs, fit only to be Arcane Spellcasters and Paladins, the race so pathetic that they can’t even be Warriors. The race whose males are so tiny and fragile that heterosexual men feel uncomfortable playing them.
To highlight how stupid this is, please compare the following pictures.
 Sissy girly boy  Arnie Signs that your game might have unrealistic ideas about the human body #27, the characters who everybody says look too tiny and effeminate to carry a sword are built like fucking Conan.
So actually if I want an avatar which I can comfortably inhabit, one which reflects how I actually look in real life, or an idealised version thereof, what I wind up with is this:
 I have the same problem with shoes Yes, my hair’s a slightly different colour and isn’t braided, yes I have more than two toes and yes I don’t actually have breasts or tusks but if I had to pick a WoW avatar that I most strongly identify with it would be the female troll. Tall, thin, kind of lanky and with big, slightly funny shaped feet that you have trouble getting shoes for. That’s what I look like, and by and large it’s what I want to look like.
Video game avatars are idealised versions of ourselves, but it’s very rare that I encounter a male avatar in a video game which I either recognise or aspire to. I’m playing a male character in Arcanum at the moment (because I wanted to be able to wear a Top Hat, although it turns out that the darned thing isn’t modeled on my character) but that’s a game from – like – 2002 so I really don’t know what my avatar looks like other than “vaguely person-shaped” and I played a male Exile in Knights of the Old Republic 2 because I could play somebody who more or less looked like a Jedi, rather than like Macho Man Randy Savage with a lightsaber.
Why yes, that was a twenty year old pro-wrestling reference. Thanks for asking.
Class Prejudice
See what I did there… because “class” right …
Anyway.
Pop quiz. Name three male Lore figures who are (a) casters (b) not evil and (c) actually fight by casting spells.
Thrall ticks boxes one and two, but fails to tick box three – when Thrall mixes it up he fights in melee (despite the fact that “fanon” tends to assume that he’s primarily an elemental shaman). Anybody who’s played the Battle for the Undercity (or for that matter any of the Caverns of Time instances where he shows up, or anybody who’s raided Orgrimmar) knows that Thrall never got the memo about Shamans not being able to tank any more, the dude goes toe-to-toe with Varian Wrynn (who I believe canonically soloed Onyxia – although presumably that was the level 60 version). Sure, Thrall has a role as spiritual leader to his people but Blizzard is very careful to remind us that he can also murder you in the face.
What about the Prophet Velen then? Well yes, he’s technically a priest (the poster child for priesthood if you believe the Alliance T9 set) but he does remarkably little healing. Mostly he’s just a … well … prophet. Certainly we never see him standing behind Varian Wrynn, wearing a sissy robe and spamming Renew.
The Mages of Dalaran? Frankly if you can remember the names of a single one of them you’re doing better than me, and anyway the poster child for Dalaran magecraft is still Jaina Proudmoore. Plus their city got roflstomped by Arthas before he was even the Lich King.
On the subject of which, Ner’zul? Fails the evil test (although he was arguably redeemed at a couple of points) and he somehow lost a mystical battle for control of his own damned soul to a whiny prince with no mystical training whatsoever.
Tirion Fordring? Technically a caster, and definitely a conduit for the Holy Power of the Light, but once again does all of his work up close and personal with the Ashbringer.
Even if you take out the “not evil” clause, which opens things out a lot the biggest male figures in Lore are still warriors or warrior-themed hybrids, the most obvious example of this being the Lich King himself. Despite the fact that his entire army is built around the work of mages, priests and scientists, Arthas himself remains a resolutely martial figure. None of this nancy-boy necromancy, nerdy plague-crafting or girly book learning for Arthas, no sir – like an undead Chuck Norris he delivers a roundhouse kick to the frozen wastes of Northrend and bam, a legion of Frost Dragons rises up out of the ice. Kapow.
About the only male lore figure who’s an out-and-out spellcaster is Kael’thas Sunstrider, and look what happens to him. Starting out as the young ambitious leader of his people, he becomes a weak, ineffective pawn of the Burning Legion. Yes he was technically a bigger boss in Burning Crusade than Illidian, but only because the developers timed things wrong. And the guy finally goes down in a freaking five man, how pathetic is that? It’d be like if Arthas escaped from you in ICC and you downed him in Halls of Reflection.
All of the real men in WoW are fighters. Honest, in your face, teeth-punching axe-wielding fighters. The scientists, the intellectuals, and the magicians are all sidekicks, madmen, or failures.
There are reasons why this is weird, and reasons why it’s a real problem.
It’s weird because you’d think that since the target audience of WoW is, by and large, geeky that it would be more inclined to represent the geekier pursuits in a more positive light. Surely at least half the player base must be people who would rather solve their problems with their brains than their fists – even if all they use their brains for is focusing the vast eldrich power needed to destroy their enemies. Again, if the game is about fulfilling our fantasies then – well I can’t speak for anybody else but I’ve spent far more time thinking “If I could throw fireballs I would be totally asploding you right now” than thinking “If I was six foot six, heavily built, and good at fighting, I would be beating you up in a conventionally manly fashion right now.”
It’s a problem because it reinforces the notion that conventional physical violence is an integral part of what it means to be a man.
Okay, so this is the part where the frivolous gender-issues post with the lighthearted pictures of Blood Elves gets all serious and after-school special.
If you hang out in the feminist blogsphere you hear a lot about violence against women, you hear a lot about rape culture, you hear a lot about victim-blaming and slut-shaming and all sorts of horrible stuff which the patriarchy, or the kyriarchy or whatever the heck you want to call it does to women. This isn’t a post about women, it’s a post about men, but it’s going to be difficult to talk about one without talking about the other.
Gender, Intersectionality, and Violence Against Men
If I had to summarise the concept of “rape culture” in a short paragraph at the end of a blog post, I’d do it like this:
There exists a notion in society at large that on some level women are “for” sex. Part of the reason that rape is so widespread, so little reported, and so seldom the subject of successful prosecutions is that on some level, society considers the sexual abuse of women to be part of the natural order. On some level people really do think that women who flirt with strangers, women who go out drinking, women who wear short skirts or high heels, or who go home with men they meet in bars really are “asking for it”.
This is, I hope nobody will disagree, totally fucked up.
What I want to talk about now is the analogous concept applied to men. I don’t in any way want to belittle or demean the experiences of women, and the reason I’m making the comparison with attitudes to rape at all is to highlight how messed up our attitudes to gender are in general so apologies in advance if anybody finds the comparison offensive. I’m not trying to start a round of Oppression Olympics.
Just as conventional notions of gender tell us that women are “for” sex, so conventional notions of gender tell us that men are “for” violence. One of those statistics that everybody knows but nobody thinks that anybody else knows is that young men are overwhelmingly more likely than any other demographic to be the victims of most sorts of violent crime. An eighteen year old woman is actually a lot safer walking alone at night than a man of the same age. The simple reason for this is that while there are taboos against physically attacking women, there are no such taboos against attacking men. It’s not okay to beat up women, because women aren’t able to defend themselves, but it’s perfectly okay to beat up men, because if a man can’t defend himself it’s his fault.
While Tam and I were in Edinburgh we went to see a comedian called Sammy J – he’s a very good comic and we’d seen his show in Edinburgh the last two years we were there. Normally he did one-man comic plays, but this time it was a standup show full of personal anecdotes and a strong theme of the show was the fact that Sammy J (who is Australian, for what it’s worth) is somewhat lacking in the qualities which his culture requires of a “proper” man. “Sammy J isn’t a fighter” he told us several times over the course of the evening.
The final anecdote in his show was about his stint at a comedy festival in Australia (I want to say Melbourne) which, in its last week, overlaps with a nationwide stock car rally. I won’t give the full details because I can’t really remember them, but the long and the short of it is that during his set he inadvertently offended a large, drunk stock-car enthusiast. After the show, this large, drunk stock car enthusiast broke into his dressing room, forced him onto his knees, threatened him with a glass bottle, and told him that when he got outside he (the stock car enthusiast) and his mates would be waiting for Sammy J in the car park, where they would kill him.
What was so upsetting about this anecdote was the genuine sense of shame that came across throughout the anecdote. Of course Sammy J is a comedian and it’s possible that he’d invented the whole thing for comic effect but since the whole thing was … well … not at all funny I’m inclined to believe it was true. His commentary on the whole experience was shot through with this genuine sense of self-blame which was deeply uncomfortable – he explained how his friends had asked why he didn’t just “lamp the guy one” how he didn’t blame the guy for breaking into his dressing room and physically assaulting him, because it couldn’t have been nice to have a room full of people laughing at him, and how it was alright because probably the guy had “only wanted to humiliate him”. You had the victim of an assault standing on stage and blaming himself for the attack, because he didn’t have the qualities that his culture expected men to have.
This is all kinds of fucked up, but the same sort of thing goes on every day. From school age on upwards, boys and young men are physically attacked for being small or weak or bookish, or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some will be badly injured, some will die, and they’ll all be taught that it’s their fault for not being strong enough. Because if you’re a man you have to be able to fight, and you have to be able to win, or else you deserve whatever you get.
And you’re not allowed to say you’re upset. You’re not allowed to say you’re scared. You’re not allowed to say that actually you don’t feel safe walking home at night. You’re not allowed to say that since you were attacked you’ve not felt safe in your own town or on your own street, because that’s not what men do. And the most supportive thing anybody is going to say to you is “give ‘em hell next time.” It’s exactly the same shaming, victim blaming mentality we’re so used to talking about when it’s applied to women, and it’s exactly as wrong and as messed up.
Of course WoW is just a video game, but it’s part of a broad cultural movement that promotes a narrow, damaging view of masculinity, and supports a very real culture of violence which is genuinely harmful.
On the upside though, it lets you kill internet dragons.
By Tamarind, on August 24th, 2010
I’ve thrown myself enthusiastically into having a main again by embarking on a succession of entirely pointless rep grinds. I feel pretty ambivalent about rep grinds as a general rule – yet there is some strange, masochistic part of me that is drawn to them. (For the record, 24th August, 2010, still not king no ooze). I suppose it’s partially because you can do them in conjunction with other things you secretly feel might be a waste of time – like, for example, watching television. I don’t actually think watching television is a waste of time but because we didn’t have one for much of my childhood, and because I don’t own one myself, I’ve never really formed the habit, although I have no compunction in leeching from my housemates. And there’s something strangely compelling about grinding mobs, or doing dailies, while watching TV programmes you’d never in a million years actively choose to watch.
The upside is that I’m now an Argent Champion and a Guardian of Cenarius – although I have to admit to not really giving a fuck about Cenarius, but he does give his guardians shiny black hippogriff so I think we must be friends.
The downside is that I seem to have a raging addiction to Gossip Girl – I know, I know, I’ll be killing myself in shame after I’ve finished this blog post. I suppose it’s partially because I’m only paying one eye and one ear’s worth of attention but there’s something unbelievably compelling about seeing horrible beautiful people doing nasty things to other horrible beautiful people while you’re poisoning peons. Also I don’t know how long they can keep telling the same story over and over again (x dates y, y thinks x is cheating with z, q really fancies y and therefore feeds y false information, x and y break up, y dates q, q now thinks y is still sleeping with x), but I think inexperience means I haven’t built up the mental strength to resist it, and I’m completely fascinated. Since I can’t write a paragraph about Gossip Girl without saying something pretentious, the constant revolutions and reversions, and the characters’ seeming inability to escape from them, makes the whole thing (probably unintentionally) come across as some kind of 21st century Dance To the Music of Time:
The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.
For the record I’ve found I’ll watch literally anything while I’m rep grinding. I’ve even watched Cafael (things I learned about life from watching Cadfael: 1) don’t get murdered in Medieval England, 2) herbs grow in discrete blocks, and never overlap with each other, so you can identity UNFAILINGLY where somebody died from the herbs on their corpse). My latest excuse for continuing to watch my housemate’s DVDs of Gossip Girl is the Netherwing, with whom I am currently juuuuust revered. Truthfully, it’s not just Blair Waldorf, it’s those shiny shiny dragons. I was disconcerted when I confessed my secret attraction to Gossip Girl the Netherwing drakes in SAN and Issy immediately asked if I was going to buy the poo coloured one or the vomit coloured one … but, dammit, I still like the look of them. And unlike the Jamie Oliver drakes, at least they don’t look perpetually lobotomized. Perhaps I’ll get the wee coloured one, that’ll show her.
I was actually doing pretty well until I hit revered, except now my will has flagged a bit, since I’ve worked out that unless I do some pretty serious egg hunting it’ll take me about 8 days of dailies to hit exalted. In MMO terms that’s a pretty serious commitment, hell if I had to cook dinner for 8 consecutive days I’d freak out at the unfairness of it. And I know you don’t have to do dailies literally every day (despite the name) but once you’ve formulated the magic number every day missed becomes an extension of the sentence.
The strange thing is that until I hit this latest roadblock, I was actually quite enjoying myself. I think a large part of whether a rep grind feels like a chore or an activity you might find fun is imaginative engagement – either because you like the faction itself or because it feels somehow fitting for your character that they’d be in with that Faction. I mean, Comfrey would love to be the Guardian of Cenarius, I think, it’s so druidic. And I know Chas is a big fan of the Ebon Blade, because what self-respecting DK wouldn’t be into them. One of the things that’s actually quite interesting about the way WotLK panned out is that you have all these different factions taking the fight to the Lich King in their own ways, and they all have their own agendas and emphasis. And obviously the Ebon Blade are all about using his own weapons against him, and generally doing what it takes to get the job done: in short, they’re pleasingly psychotic. So there’s an extent to which you can throw your lot in with the folks who suit your character best, or whose dailies you enjoy the most – the minor matter of getting your hat enchanted aside, of course. I think I am exalted with all the WotLK factions, but honestly it’s been largely incidental.
Perhaps I’m just contrary but the other thing that makes a rep grind bearable for me is the fact of its being optional. I mean, I know there’s an extent ALL rep grinds, I mean it’s not obligatory to have a head enchant but considering the lengths your average raider will go to optimize, such grinds are not really optional at all. I had one of those moments, actually, when I swung by Hodir to pick up a new inscription of the storm and realised that all that pain, all that misery, all that long long long grind, had been for 24 extra spell power. 24?! 24?! Is that ALL?! 1 more than a single epic gem. And I know actually 24 sp makes a real difference, especially when you’re starting the gearing process but, y’know, my poking stick alone has 741 spellpower on it.
I resented, and still resent, the Sons of Hodir bitterly, and I know I keep going on about them but I’m scarred, I tell you, scarred. The point is that they were most assuredly not optional, since the only way to get shoulder enchants was to do their stupid dailies or be an inscriber. And they didn’t have a tabard so there was no CHOICE to the grind: you were their bitch, and that was that. I know nowadays you can pick up a handful of ulduar relics extremely cheaply but when I NEEDED that 24sp so did everyone else, so relics were pricey, and you’d get less than a handful from a canter through HoS or HoL.
Also the sons of Hodir were never particularly anchored in the main Wrath plot, being a sort of after-thought of the titan stuff Blizzard keeps abandoning. And it didn’t help that the dailies were this pseudo-Norse, hypermasculinised cock-joke fest, which my dorf would likely have enjoyed … but not my belf priest in his sissy robe. Tam looks like he’d lose a fight with a daffodil, let alone a flying wrym. And don’t get me wrong, I love WoW’s pop culture references and the in-jokes and the little asides, but the entirety of the Sons was focused on innuendo – the upshot of which was that you were always very conscious that you were playing a game. The story, such as it was, was locked away from the rest of the WotLK, the grind (like everything else in Wrath) was artificially gated to extend its lifespan and this, combined with the constant snigger-factor, meant it was next to possible to work up any sort of investment in the grind as anything other than a rep grind. At least when you were doing the Ebon Blade dailies, or wearing the Kirin Tor tabard into instances, you could at least pretend that this was part of your war against the Lich King.
And I know 24 extra spellpower will also help you fight the Lich King but it’s hardly the most brave and glamorous way to take the fight to his door is it? Ultimately, I know WoW is nothing but a series of arbitrary hoops, but it’s how those hoops are disguised that creates interest. Hodir were the hoopiest hoops that ever hooped.
Perhaps my more cheerful attitude to the Netherwing comes from the fact I volunteered to do this, so it’s not like Hodir trying to get me to touch his horn in funny ways without my consent. I suspect, however, it would have been hell “back in the day” and I think the drop rates of just about everything have been significantly improved – I mean just by walking around I have Netherwing Crystals coming out my arse, more than I will ever need or want. Also I think it helps that it’s a frivolity-based grind. I’m not going to get anything out of this except something pretty-looking, and I find vanity is a stronger motivator than necessity.
The plot arc is genuinely quite engaging – perhaps not eight more days of engaging but the dragons are depending on me! And you do feel pretty heroic, running about saving the netherwing from enslavement by the Dragonmaw. In fact, you get to simultaneously be a HERO and a SPY and a BADASS which just about covers all bases. You’re a hero because of the aforementioned dragon saving, you’re a spy because you have to disguise yourself as a Dragonmaw orc and you’re a badass because in order to spy effectively you have to become trusted by the Dragonmaw. I love opportunities to be a little bit bad, especially when they come supplied with their own moral getout clause. I felt especially smug on taking down Captain Skyshatter, smug and relieved I wasn’t doing this in The Burning Crusade when I could be knocked off my flying mount.
Although there’s a bit of ritual humiliation involved in that quest. You pick it up and he immediately starts yelling (yes, yelling, across the whole zone) for somebody to light a funeral pyre because Tamarind has challenged him and was about to get publicly pwned. So, of course, you fail the quest. And then pick it up again. Whereupon Skyshatter once more urges some random level 66s and a level 80 shaman to light the funeral pyre because Tamarind is about to fail to a complete a severely nerfed quest. And then you’re self-conscious so you fail again, so you have to try again. And this time, when Captain Skyshatter, politely requests a funeral pyre for that noob Tamarind, you get a bunch of lols across general… ho hum.
The dailies are pretty simple, although they seem to involve largely picking on the peons, by poisoning or chastising them. And anything involving orcish peons reminds me for WCIII, so I’m happy. I especially enjoy watching the disgruntled peons. They’ll be getting on with their work and then they’ll clearly come to some deep and profound conclusion, whereupon they’ll stalk away from their fellow workers and immediately start trying to rally support for their cause, waving theirr little orcish arms around. My favourite is “work is da poop” which I think must be Orcish for “we should unionise but some nefarious bastard keeping feeding us rotten mutton.”
By Tamarind, on August 23rd, 2010
I’m baaaaaack (in case my posting didn’t clue you into that on its own), and I temporarily lost my WoW mojo. Mainly I’ve been leveling Comfrey via LFG (more on this in later posts, I’m sure) and although that’s been educational and not entirely un-fun (largely thanks to SAN) I became rather detached from my main. Indeed, my poor priest feels less like a main these days than some poor wandering bastard with no sense of self-identity left to him.
I was not unhappy in Nevernever land. There were all the raid spots I wanted and I liked those folks, I truly did, but they weren’t any sort of natural fit for me. They were fun, but I was never going to find friends there, not, I admit, that I was really looking very hard. I learned a lot, I saw a different way of doing things, and it was certainly a crash course in patience and being LAID BACK for me, which was exactly what I wanted (and probably needed). However, when I came back from Edinburgh I just couldn’t quite face raiding with them again. There seems to be no easy compromise: I love raiding, to the extent that I can appreciate the occasional hard fast pug, but in the longer term I miss the journey too much, the people you raid with, and the shared struggle towards victory. Don’t get me wrong, I think pugging has its place – I think if you don’t pug you just cut yourself from the wider community and deny yourself avenues of growth and experience – but I’m probably always going to be happier in a guild.
Also I found myself in this absurd position of working my arse off on some incredibly gruelling heroic fights … still without a LK kill to my name. I didn’t mind, new challenges are always good, I didn’t join Nevernever Land to get myself a LK kill, and I’ve entirely abandoned any ambitions to piss in the big man’s ug boots before the close of this expansion.
I’m also one of those gardener type players – happy to spend incalculable hours tending their main, weeding the herbaceous border, checking on the saplings, that kind of thing. With my growing disinterest in raiding came a similar disinterest in my main. I lost all sense of the character, and therefore most in-game activities were rendered pretty hollow. I seriously thought about retiring until Cataclysm.
Regardless, I soon recognised that my wandering days were truly over. I parted from Nevernever Land on good terms, although truthfully with more regret on their side than on mine. But I feel vaguely proud of the fact that I managed to leave at least one of my many many guilds on good terms. And then I came home.
And became myself again.
I was so very tempted to make myself a smokin hot troll called Tamtu but a belf in a sissy robe disappeared some months ago and a belf in a sissy robe returned. Considering that Tamarind is now a paladin, I have no idea how I can justify the existence of two very similar prissy belves but … at this stage … who cares.
 PS - this is the best screenshot I have ever taken in WoW. Like ever. It was a total accident as well. Pressed the wrong button when trying to avoid getting blown up. I don’t know why it is that Argent Dawn feels like home to me, when no other server does, or why it makes a difference where I am wandering, but it does. Perhaps it was because it was the first place that Chas and I really found ourselves, took our first shaky steps into raiding. And even though I rarely RP myself I miss RP when it’s not happening; moreover, compared to the many servers, normal and abnormal I have experienced, Argent Dawn has always had a good feel.
Karma is probably laughing its arse off at me now – I embarked on a journey of discovery only to end up exactly where I began, still with no fucking clue.
By Chastity, on August 18th, 2010
I’ve done a couple of guides on this blog before, in particular a guide to gearing at 80 and a guide to battlegrounds. Now that I’ve hit the end-of-expansion lull, what I’m interested in right now is gold making.
Now the interwebs are full of gold guides – some of them charmingly out of date (the WoWwiki leatherworking section still has a lot of information on farming Hinterlands Turtles for their oh-so-valuable Rugged Leather and Turtle Meat). What I’m hoping to do here is not so much provide y’all with new information (seriously, there’s nothing I can say that somebody else hasn’t already said better, nothing at all). What I want to do instead is to post an alternative guide to gold-making with the focus on picking the strategy that is right for you instead of just maximising your gold-per-hour.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Something you’re probably already aware of if you did GCSE business studies, or have read any other gold-making guide is the idea of opportunity cost. As a great man once said, the true cost of anything is what you give up in order to obtain it.
Most serious gold-making guides will reduce opportunity cost to simple gold-per-hour: a half-hour spent on the AH can make more gold than a half hour spent farming herbs, QED auctioneering is better than herbing. This is okay as far as it goes, but it fails to take into account the basic and crucial fact that different people have different priorities.
Working out the true cost of an action is often extremely difficult. While the opportunity cost of an action is fairly easy to work out (it’s whatever else you could be doing with the time) there are often additional costs, or additional benefits, depending on the activity in question. The cost of something you’d be doing anyway is zero, the effective cost of something you actively dislike doing is significantly more than just the time you put into it.
Perhaps more obscurely, the value of gold is also more flexible than it seems. 20,000 gold is not necessarily four times more valuable than 5,000 gold – it depends entirely on what you want the money for. The gold-making strategy that is best for you is not the one which makes the most gold in the least time, it’s the one that gets you what you want for the lowest cost as you define it.
Selecting a Strategy
There’s no right way to make gold, but there are several wrong ways. If what you want to do is make large sums of gold with a small time investment, then farming dailies isn’t the way to do it. If what you want to do is generate money to fund your massive alt habit, farming herbs in Northrend probably isn’t the way to do it because, well, you could be playing your alts instead.
The key here is to find a way to make money that you enjoy, and which fits with the other parts of the game that you’re most interested in. Essentially if you plan it right, you should be able to do the kinds of things you actively like for, well, for fun and profit.
That said, there are some things which I think are universal.
Have a bank alt. Most (but not all) sensible ways of making gold involve using the Auction House at some point, and getting back to the AH on your main, or on the character you’re currently leveling is a pain in the neck. You pick up lots of stuff which you want to keep or sell, and being able to offload it at the nearest mailbox is far, far easier than having to cart it back to a capital.
Get Auctioneer (or equivalent) and Postal (or equivalent). Again, unless you plan to make all of your income from quest rewards and auto-selling, you’ll want to visit the Auction House at some point and if you do you’ll want to deal with it efficiently, because either you’ll like using the Auction House (in which case you’ll want to do it “properly”) or you won’t (in which case you’ll want to do it fast).
So that’s the introduction, onto the strategies:
Farming
Farming gets a bad rap. It’s certainly true that a lot of people farm when they shouldn’t – for a long time I had a bit of a mental block about buying mats on the Auction House when I could go out and farm them “for free”, despite the fact that the AH cost was relatively cheap, and in the time I spent picking flowers I could have more than recouped the cost by doing dailies.
That said, there is decent money to be made in farming, and there are actually several situations in which it’s a perfectly good strategy for your primary income stream.
Although farming isn’t a time-efficient way to make gold, it’s relatively lucrative and it has a number of points in its favour.
- RP: Perhaps I’ve been on an RP server for too long, but one of the big reasons to farm is that it’s got a nice “in-character” feel to it. Whether you’re a hunter who skins their prey, or a mad warlock concocting weird herbal preparations for the Royal Apothecary Society, gathering professions take you out into the world and make you feel like your character is really a part of Azeroth. And you get to make some cash while you’re at it.
- Flexibility: Picking flowers or digging ore while you level is generally lucrative, and it fits in around the rest of your gameplay. Same applies for lots of other things, you can gather while engaged in pretty much any of the other activities which make up your gameplay. It’s also a good gap filler if you’re waiting for a raid, or queueing for a dungeon or battleground.
- Relaxation: Some people simply find farming relaxing. You can whack on some TV in the background and do a circuit of Icecrown or wherever and come home with some decent cash or useful mats.
Bottom line: unless you’re a dirty cheating botter or have a lot of time on your hands, farming is never going to gold-cap you, but it’s a perfectly good way of making enough to pay the bills. If you’re not shooting for a Mammoth or a Motorbike, farming is a low-stress, highly reliable way to pick up a decent income.
Dailies
The interesting thing about Daily Quests is that they’re the only reliable gold-making strategy which doesn’t rely on other players. In a sense, I like to view Daily Quests as a “baseline” gold strategy. The bottom can fall out of a market with little to no warning, but doing a daily quest is a one hundred percent reliable way to make a medium-sized sum of gold regardless of circumstances. In Wrath, Daily Quests can make you about twelve gold each, and you can do twenty four a day, for 288 gold per day, which you can pick up in somewhere from one to two hours. And I’m sure you all know that the Argent Tournament quests are the best for gold because they happen in a relatively small area, and some of them offer up to 26G a pop.
Reasons to farm dailies:
- RP Again: I used to love doing the Ebon Blade quests on my Death Knight, because well … I was a Death Knight, a fully paid up member of the Ebon Blade and fighting the Scarlet Crusade was a big part of my job. It wasn’t the most effective gold-making strategy in the world, but it got me my Epic Flying.
- Ancilliary Rewards Most Dailies have other ancilliary rewards attached to them. My Paladin was grinding the Argent Tournament for a long time for the Dragonhawk (seriously, I have wanted one of those for sooo long) and of course srs raiders will want to max out whatever reputation grinds are necessary to purchase Arcanums (Arcana?) and shoulder enchants.
- The Joy of Soloing Some people just plain like questing. Sure, dailies get repetitive after a while, but when you get right down to it, most of them involve killing monsters and looting their corpses which is, well, sort of what the game is about. For a lot of people, that’s the bottom line. If you want to make money doing something that at least vaguely resembles the game you signed up to play, dailies are the way of doing it.
Daily quests are a small, reliable source of income. If you’re not saving to buy Shadowmourne, or spending a fortune on raiding mats it’s more than enough to get by. By the time you’re Exalted with the Sons of Hodir you should have enough cash to cover all your basic needs.
Throw in the dungeon finder and you’ve got an even better income stream, and you get to do group content as well. Just don’t disenchant boss drops unless they auto-sell for less than a shard. And remember to buy gems with your spare emblems.
Altaholism for Fun and Profit
With a reasonable eye to the auction house, leveling an alt is a net profit. It’s not a huge profit by any means, but I’m sort of assuming that if you’re leveling alts its because you want to level them (so again what you have here is zero opportunity cost – you’d be doing this anyway, the trick is to make as much cash as you can on the side).
Take at least one gathering profession (I would say take two, but to be honest dual-gathering always feels a bit soulless to me), install Auctioneer, and auction all the green and white items you pick up in your travels. If you’re leveling a crafting profession, make sure you’ve got an Enchanter, because chances are the mats are worth more than whatever you’re making.
As with the other methods above, this isn’t going to gold cap you, but you should never find your alts draining your coffers. A well managed leveler can make enough money to cover mounts, flying and training, and still have enough left over to contribute to your main’s Mammoth Fund.
The big advantage of leveling for gold is that you have nearly zero downtime. While raiding does actually incur expenses, leveling tends to make money (in small amounts) even with no gold strategy at all, and so anything you make on the way is pure sweet profit. Your gold-per-hour is going to be feeble, but your gold-per-time-spent-doing-things-you-don’t-want-to-do is hopefully going to be enormous.
Peeveepee
Like altaholism, PvPing for money isn’t a way to hit goldcap, it’s a way to make a side profit from something you’d do anyway. The basic method (which may or may not survive into Cataclysm) is to blow your spare honour on gems and flog them on the AH.
Again, it’s not the most efficient way to make a buck but it’s even lower cost than leveling. Assuming you actually like PvP, you can sit in a capital city chaining battlegrounds as much as you like, and dropping whatever spare honour you have into the gem market. Not only that but if you’re a full time PvPer, you’ve got effectively zero outlay – you don’t accrue repair costs like you would when raiding, you probably won’t be dropping fish feasts and you might even not bother with flasks depending on how you’re playing.
Again the important thing to remember here is that gold-making is all about being able to get what you want when you want it. For a srs pvper pretty much everything you want to buy, you buy with honour, so any gold you make on the side is a bonus. Heck, if you’re really serious about PvPing you barely need to leave town. You can queue for battlegrounds from anywhere, and join Arena matches from Dalaran.
Srs Auctioneering
I’m not going to say much about making money by Srs Auctioneering. There’s lots of other blogs that talk about serious auction strategy.
The auction house is the income source for people who want to be WoW millionaires. It’s the income stream for people who are interested in making money for its own sake, or for big, flashy gold sinks. It’s sort of a mini-game of its own, and people who get good at it make a lot of gold and derive an immense amount of satisfaction from it. In terms of strict gold per hour, playing the AH is probably the best income source in the game, but the fact is that a lot of people just don’t like doing it. If you don’t derive active pleasure from the idea of buying things for some money, and then selling them for more money, or processing them into things that you can sell for more money, then you don’t actually need to play the AH. You can get all the money you need for everything you need from other, less fiddly parts of the game, and you can have a decent time in the process.
What I would say, however, is that a basic knowledge of the Auction House will do nobody any harm. You acquire a whole lot of crap in WoW, and most of it is worth something to somebody (particularly on RP servers, where people will regularly pay good money for grey or white quality items with an interesting look) and being able to whack a bunch of stuff on the AH before you log off for the evening is a good way to supplement whatever other income strategy you take.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that there are a whole lot of different ways to make money in WoW, and the trick isn’t (as many would have you believe) to pick the one which gets you to goldcap fastest – you only need enough gold to get the things you want – the trick is to find the strategy which dovetails most neatly with your preferred playstyle.
Personally, I do inscription, so I’m going to be screwed come Cataclysm.
By Chastity, on August 6th, 2010
Hi, you’ve got through to Righteous Orbs.
Tamarind and Chastity aren’t here to write updates right now, due to the Edinburgh Festival.
In the meantime here is a picture of a kitten.
 This is a picture of a kitten. Back in a week, after which time I confidently expect Cataclysm to have a firm release date, and the DK frost tree to have tier one talents that aren’t useless filler.
By Tamarind, on August 3rd, 2010
Nobody does the level 58-60 dungeons anymore because you can go straight to Outland, and, to be honest, I’ve had very little experience of them myself – I’ve paid maybe one or two tourism visits in my WoW career, and I’ve always been well over the level range so although I’ve appreciated them as places, or as designs, I’ve never really understood what they were like to run.
This is what they are like to run:
(Screenshot courtesy of Issy: I was too busy swearing and dying)
Tanking Dire Maul was like … God … I have no words. Let me put my reaction in the form of a graph:
I mean, seriously, it was like I walked through the door and Blizzard was like “Why, hello there, Tam, I see you’re a paladin tank, good for you, we’re now going to take a tender part of your anatomy and put it in a vice. HOW DO YOU LIKE TANKING NOW, BITCH?”
In Dire Maul there are mobs, right, come in packs of three or four …
…that silence you
…aaaand then eat all your mana.
(And then tell you you’re crap in bed).
I mean talk about how to render a paladin tank completely useless in 2.4seconds.
And then there are these packs of ogres, containing 2 caster type ogres at the back, and 2 ME SMASH TAMARIND type ogres in the front. And I have done my tanking research, I know how I’m theoretically supposed to deal with casters. Like this:
 Please note: this drawing is not to scale Except what would happen in practice is that I’d throw my holy Frisbee of ogre silencing and, I don’t know, the two caster-type ogres would be positioned just slightly too far apart so instead of ricocheting from one to the other, driving the whole group forward, my holy Frisbee would just become embedded in ogre blubber and stay there. The consequence of which would be: the two smashy ogres would be all “hey, you stuck a Frisbee in our friend in the sissy robe” and come charging forward, the silenced ogre would skulk forward for the 3 seconds in which he was silenced and then stand still and start casting, and then the unsilenced caster the back would just hammer into me happily with magic. Oh yes, and the smashy ogres cripple you as well. And I know you’re supposed to strafe round and all that, but it’s bloody difficult when four ogres are beating you and you’re trying to dispel a cripple on yourself.
So, yeah, this just in: tanking is fucking hard.
Part of it, of course, just my inexperience. I can do simple positioning, I can LoS pull, I can keep my healer from dying, I can maintain threat, I know to put my back to a wall when there’s a knock-back effect, I know that it’s important to gather up casters so they don’t blast the shit out of the delicate types at the back, and I know to turn things that vomit or cleave or do otherwise AoE type nastiness away from the raid. But the complex maneuvers required to keep a large group of mobs, all of whom are attacking at a subtly different distance, in front of me are still a bit shaky. In all honesty.
Part of it, of course, just my inexperience. I can do simple positioning, I can LoS pull, I can keep my healer from dying, I can maintain threat, I know to put my back to a wall when there’s a knock-back effect, I know that it’s important to gather up casters so they don’t blast the shit out of the delicate types at the back, and I know to turn things that vomit or cleave or do otherwise AoE type nastiness away from the party. But the complex maneuvers required to keep a large group of mobs, all of whom are attacking at a subtly different distance, in front of me are still a bit shaky. In all honesty.
And I think another part of the problem, actually, is tanking in a pug. Yeah, that’s right, blame the pugs. It’s not that I’m not very good, it’s the pugs, I tell ya, the damn pugs. I mean there are several ways you can tank more effectively – take time to position, consider each pull strategically, use LoS – but the effectiveness of tanking in a pug is measured on one thing and one thing alone: speed. Which is, of course, entirely dependent on over-gearing the instance. I mean, I can roll through BRD and look like an awesome tank, with very little effort involved. It’s partially just knowledge of the instance, which mobs can be safely chain-pulled, how to deal with a certain group of casters, practice and familiarity, and all that, coming together to allow for tanking largely without thought.
But when I’m in new territory I do actually require thinking time. I mean, not hours, not minutes of it, I’m not standing there going “uhhhh” with drool falling out my mouth, I mean a second or two to consider how I’m going to attempt to pull an unfamiliar group of creatures without leading to them running amok or munching on the healer. Of course, if you pause for so much as millisecond in a pug, either somebody will starting shouting gogogogogo at you or someone will helpfully pull for you (usually a hunter or a DK…) which means you have to actually run in there half-baked, wasting unnecessary taunts and cooldowns, and you spend all your energy trying to establish control of the pull. Gah.
We wiped so many times that in the end our frustrated pugees – a level 61 DK who was making no attempt to throttle his threat, I was glad to have driven away, and a rather decent resto shammy I wasn’t, – all abandoned us. Whereupon we decided to 3-man it, at level 58, as a paladin, a warrior and a shammy with no cc, so not the smartest move in the world but, bizarrely, once we got over the “holy fuck this is difficult” moment, it was actually far easier than with the 2 pugees bitching and moaning behind us.
I think there was a sort of crunch point, after which it got easier still, where we realised that careless, kamikaze tanking (as is the accepted mode nowadays) wasn’t going to get us through. So we ended up winding the game back about 2 years and we used every trick in the book, mainly LoS pulling and positioning to be fair, to get through. And by taking it slowly, considering each group, marking up a kill order and actually taking time to discuss a strategy with each other we slowly, very slowly, conquered Dire Maul. I know it’s basically pretty simple (pull a bunch of ogres, hide under a ramp) but it makes you feel clever, but doing simple things that make you feel clever is deeply satisfying.
The other thing is about it, I think I learned more about tanking in three (lengthy) trips to Dire Maul than I did in the previous 30 levels. I’m not putting on my Dumbing It Down For the Casuals hat, or getting elitist about the virtues of things being hard, but overgearing everything – as one currently does what with heirlooms and the ability shift associated with tacking 20 more levels onto the end of a game – does make you incredibly complacent. Every time I get a new tanking ability I make a commitment to use it at least once in the next dungeon I run (unless it’s completely unhelpful) so I form the habit and get a handle on my class but actually you can get through using only holy Frisbee and lolsecrate.
And I’m not a good paladin tank by any means – I am very much a paladin tank with L plates – but really it wasn’t until I hit Dire Maul that I realised how much I had to learn about. And perhaps that’s because I’m a cocky idiot who is overly inclined to think I’m an awesome at stuff until painfully proven otherwise but actually I’m really glad I didn’t faceroll my way into Outland without a clue. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I’m serious about my own-found inclination to stand at the front in my non-sissy platemail that it would help if I knew what the hell I was doing.
The sad thing is, I suspect I could get quite a long way without really knowing all that much about tanking. And I also reckon that even though folks in the heroic LFG grind are pretty unforgiving there’s an extent to which gear and apathy completely diminish the distance between a good tank and a bad tank. Back when I was a new priest on the block, I really noticed when I had a good tank, and the whole group suffered from a bad one. Nowadays I don’t care, it makes absolutely no different to the outcome – which is 2 frost badges I don’t really need for the price of tedium. It actually takes 4 really abysmally bad players to sabotage a run. The other day I remember thinking a tank was rather squishy, inspected him at the end of the run and realised he was nowhere near def-cap and wearing just about the worst itemized set of ungemmed blues and purples I had ever seen. I know skill is not about gear but wearing the right gear, even if it’s not the best gear, is some kind of indicator.
Of course, I’m also simultaneously attempting to druid heal my way 80 (currently languishing at 73, and it feels like I’ve spent a lifetime at 73) via LFG, and the cracks are beginning to show again. Heirlooms compensate a bit at this level but I have no idea from what dank hole of ineptitude the average pre-80 Northrend tank has crawled. And it’s all such banal failure as well – stupid things like massively over-pulling, not controlling the mobs at all, getting knocked back into other mobs, pulling when I’m on a mana break. I resent these wipes because they’re completely unnecessary. I have a friend in SAN who is also leveling to 80 at the same time as me – he’s one of those lifestyle tanks, as I’m a lifestyle healer, and when we run dungeons together we haven’t had a single wipe. Not one.
The difference is, I suppose, that nobody is geared enough to compensate, so we’re expected to play like we know what the hell we’re doing. And I can’t work out if it’s laziness, a genuine failure to adapt from running heroics at 80 in ICC gear, or the fact that nobody has really had to learn how to do their bloody job because they could previously rely on rolling over stuff with heirlooms and AoE!lol. As, err, I was.
Anyway, I don’t normally do achievement spam but this is one I’m genuinely proud of:
By Chastity, on August 2nd, 2010
I vaguely intended this to be a post about talents. Then I got distracted.
So I’ve been following the beta failrly closely (albeit from afar because apparently Tam LOST OUR BETA INVITE because he thought it was spam). I’ve been particularly following warriors because, while I don’t play one, they seem to be the furthest along on the development path.
Fury Warriors recently got a talent called Rude Interruption which is basically the warrior equivalent of Arcane’s new Invocation talent. Now both of these talents are the kind of thing I’m looking forward to in Cataclysm – talents that genuinely seem useful in both PvE and PvP (because more damage is good, and anything that encourages people to interrupt stuff is good).
What I’m annoyed about isn’t the talent. It’s the icon.
Here is a handy screenshot:
 One Of These Talents Is Not Like The Others What you might notice is that the portrait in the icon is fairly identifiably female.
What you can’t see from the screenshot is that it’s the only identifiably female face in the entire talent tree. There’s a good spread of images used for abilities in the warrior tree – Orcs, Humans, Tauren, head-shots, full body shots, close-ups of eyes.
Pretty much every single human or humanoid face in the warrior tree is male (or at least sufficiently masculinised that they read as male to me).
“Rampage”: Picture of a bald man screaming in fury.
“Intensify Rage”: Picture of a male orc roaring at the camera.
“Revenge”: Close-up of an eye which could read as gender-neutral, but seems fairly masculine to me, staring intensely past the edge of a blade.
“Deadly calm”: Grizzled looking man with a beard and a helmet.
“Last Stand”: Shouting man with his shirt off.
What’s the one female face we see in the entire damned tree? “Rude Interruption”. A hysterical woman shouting with her horrid shrill girl-voice (which apparently grants her a 10% damage buff for 30 seconds).
It’s a small thing, and it doesn’t mean much by itself, but it stood out to me for some reason. I had a look through the Warlock talent trees and it’s the same story. Guys on fire, obviously male-looking demons (except for the Succubus, obviously), and of course Metamorphosis which not only has a male face on the icon but actually gives you a male avatar for the duration even if your character is female.
As ever, I’m not saying that Blizzard are the bad guys from a Joss Whedon show, I’m not saying that they sit around cackling, rubbing their hands, and devising new ways to be mildly sexist because they hates teh wimminz. It’s just that for all the gender-equality you get in character creation, Blizzard’s conception of a Warrior, or a Warlock, or … well pretty much anything except a healing spec really … defaults to male.
Of course the really annoying thing is that a lot of the time I know I’d do the same. You ask me to illustrate “Hunger For Blood” or “Slaughter from the Shadows” or “Abomination’s Might” then I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t draw a woman for any of them. If I had limited development resources for my shiny new warlock-transformation power, then I’m pretty sure I’d implement a male model and leave the female model for a later content patch. If I was designing demons for the game, chances are the only one I’d make explicitly female is the sex-demon.
But I like to think I wouldn’t attach the only female face in my talent tree to something which reinforces an infuriating gender stereotype.
I mean srsly. “Rude Interruption”? Srsly?
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