More wiping

Spent an hour in a new (to me) dungeon in WoW this evening, and very frustrating it was too. The party wiped twice, and nearly wiped twice more. The mobs in Maraudon are cleverer than in lower levels: they know to try to take out the healer, and react sooner and more viciously to my presence. I died in every run. In the end, the team just withered away, dropping out one by one after the last wipe. I have the strong feeling that at least some blamed me for the wipes. "WTF healer!" from somebody who ran ahead of the group, got out of sight and was hammered.

I see that differently. If I (the healer) tell you I'm out of energy (unable to do any healing in the immediate future) and sit down to replenish energy, and if you (the tank or DPSer) then walk away from me and get into trouble: that's your own damned fault and it serves you right.

It's amazing to me how little some players know about the mechanics of WoW: it comes as a great surprise to them to discover that I cannot heal them at great distances, or with walls between us. Many tanks don't appreciate that their role is to prevent others from receiving damage (the healer, for example) and will ignore cries for help from the "squishies."

Healing is a fulfilling role in itself, but carries much frustration with it. On the positive side, tanks and healers can always get a place in a random group almost instantly: I've rarely had to wait more than two minutes after joining the queue, compared to up to a quarter-hour for my mage.

However, on the other hand, many players seem to view the healer as a silent reproach, a reminder of their imperfection and fallibility: like standing in view of a juggler while holding a broom and dustpan. When things go well, the healer is superfluous: just extra competition for the trinkets and money that should have been theirs — because they're doing all the work, amiright? But the second things start to go wrong, the cry goes up "Healer! where the fuck are you?" And if somebody dies, it's the healer's fault for not saving them.

I've been in maybe two dozen dungeon parties so far as healer, in addition to other roles, and have saved maybe a hundred people's bacon many times over. I have been thanked for that: once. Now, I'm not doing dungeons for compliments but because I enjoy the role and want to do it well; but a little recognition once in a while would be appreciated.

It's not always like that. I've had good runs through difficult dungeons, where the team moved as one and nobody died, and the difference is largely due to the tank. A good tank makes a good run, and a bad tank makes a bad run, whoever else is on the team. It's that simple. I have met three good tanks and an excellent one, and the difference between them and the bad'uns can be summed up in two words: awareness and generosity. More on tanking in another post.

Inadvertent generosity

I just figured out why my monthly payments have been so high the last few times: I've been paying an entire sim's worth of tier.

What happened was this: my neighbour T sold about half of her holding in Mugunghwa, to get down to an eighth of a sim. Her original parcel was irregularly shaped, so she ended up with a narrow stripe of land left over, adjacent to my land and including a strip of riverfront. She offered it to me, and without thinking I turned it down. I guess I thought she'd just keep it, but no: she put it up for auction.

Well, when I saw that I realized that I had to have it, else some jackass would come along and plaster the thing with hundred-metre-high soundfile-blaring porn site ads.

So I put in a bid, and, to make a long story short, won the auction. I paid over ten thousand L$ for 864 square metres. This is quite possibly a record.

Now, when you buy land directly, you have the option to buy for yourself or for a group; and groups get a 10% landholding bonus. Auctions don't work that way, you always buy for yourself. I immediately sold it to one of my alts, who bought for the group. And with that I forgot all about the episode — but the Lindens didn't.

Had my group bought this land directly, all would have been OK because the bonus would have kept my holdings under 36044 sq m. Because it became mine, I had to pay full tier on it, and so for about an hour I owned four square metres more than a half-sim. That automatically increased my tier payments to an entire sim's worth, but when my billable holdings reduced to under 32768 sq m, my tier level did not automatically decrease.

Dear Linden Labs, I just paid you the equivalent of two years' premium account fees. You're welcome.

Chatspeak deprecated

Look, I'm really sorry. I know it's snobby and literate-ist of me, but I just can't help it.

When you say "4" instead of "for", or "u" instead of "you", my estimate of your intelligence and possible interestingness takes a huge dive.

People, please: this is not cellphone texting. You don't pay by the letter here. It's awkward and I personally happen to find it rude: it suggests that I am not worthy of the extra time it would have taken you to type that second letter. Worse than that, it costs me time: I have to try to figure out what "cld" means in the context of your other abbreviations. And that's bad for you too, because it means that I've stopped listening to what you say while I work out what you said.

Can we just drop this crap and speak normally, please?

I wonder whether "get off my lawn" means anything to people who didn't grow up in the suburbs, where people had houses with private lawns? There was (still is) a great social divide between (typically) younger couples who had kids and therefore were used to children playing on their grass, and (typically) older people who didn't have kids and felt the need to protect their territory against incursion. It seems lawns can be populated either by children or by gnomes, but not both.