You don't know how much of an effect it has on me to open up the "Credits" section on a big-name game like that and see the names of people I used to work with at other companies. These aren't just names taking up space in a section they're legally required to include somewhere, these are *real people* who happen to be my friends. It is for them that I want this game to succeed. It is for them that I want the company to thrive. So if you're wondering why I'm rapidly turning into an STO fangirl, and refuse to believe that it's a genuinely good game, you can blame that for my reason.

I've been doing some research and discovered a bunch of things that aren't immediately obvious upon first starting the game.

1. How to turn on auto-fire.

I saw the auto-fire options in the options menu when I was originally poking around in there, but couldn't figure out why my weapons weren't auto-firing. Last night, I tried right-clicking on my ship's phasers, and breathed a sigh of relief. Before then, I'd been spamming Shift to fire both phasers whenever they were off cooldown, and my thumb was really starting to hurt.

2. How to turn off display of armor and kits.

I was really sad when I got my first body armor and saw that it replaced my uniform. I'd spent so long getting the colors on my uniform just right! I was starting to consider unequipping my armor whenever I was in starbase so that I could run around in a proper uniform, because I really HATE how the armor looks on my character. However, I just discovered that, like above, it is possible to right-click on your armor or kit to hide it so that you just display your uniform.

3. What the hell do these ship console stats do??

I kept getting these Science ship consoles that had weird stats like +7.5 Astrometrics or +12 Spatial Anomaly, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me what they were for. Apparently, they add ranks to certain skills (i.e. talents) that in turn buff certain abilities. Unfortunately, it appears that the randomized drops are utterly useless most of the time, because my character only got to level 8 Lieutenant, and the only science consoles I found so far were buffing skills that I can't even learn until I'm an Admiral (level 40+).

Apparently you can see which skills affect your abilities by looking at their more in-depth information on the P screen.

4. This game has nothing to do with the new rebooted movie.

I was reading through the history over the weekend, and discovered that, despite my assumptions that it was tied to the new rebooted franchise, this game doesn't have anything to do with the alternate universe created when Spock went back in time in the new movie. It actually takes place in the original timeline, a decade or two after the future part of that movie exists. I.E. Spock is apparently dead, and the Romulan Empire collapsed after its home planet was destroyed -- they're in the process of rebuilding. The Klingons were at peace with the Federation at one point but when the Klingons attacked the Romulans in their moment of weakness and the Federation defended them, it all went downhill.

I also hear rumors about the Cardassians rebuilding their home planet after the Dominion War, and that they'll eventually be another playable faction. Considering I never watched DS9 or Voyager in-depth, I don't really know many of the details of what that means.

I read this article on Massively about chaotic starting areas (which linked to this blog post) and it really made me sit back and say "you know, you're right!" I don't really have much I can add to what he already said.

Something about the STO starting area really felt jarring, and I didn't realize what it was until now. Here I am, trying to read my skill tooltips and figure out what all of these buttons do, and there are red lights flashing and people commanding me to hurry to some other place so I can do something INCREDIBLY URGENT. The game is basically shouting "gogogogogo" at me, telling me to hurry up, shouting at me to GO FASTER DO IT NAO like some bad WoW pickup group.

And that's when the conscious part of my mind forcibly breaks the illusion, and reminds the rest of me that there isn't REALLY a time limit, there isn't REALLY any urgency, the enemies standing there will continue standing there making threatening gestures at me from a safe distance until I have taken the time to figure out what I'm doing. It destroys the whole point of plopping me in the middle of all that action in the first place. Consider immersion destroyed as I learn the controls at my own pace and sigh exasperatedly at the guy who tells me that I need to hurry.

When I had to return to my ship and they stood there and explained what the three bridge officer types did before they would let me beam back to my ship and save the day, I was confused. HURRY UP! FIGHT THESE BORG! Okay, now stop and click through these three sets of dialogue boxes where we tell you things you already know... (the bridge officer powers are quite intuitive since you just read the descriptions of the three classes when you made your own character five minutes ago) OKAY NOW FIGHT THESE SHIPS!!!

It's not just STO and Champions. I noticed the same thing in Allods. Here I am, trying to figure out what this spell does, trying to figure out how to use that wand I just got as a quest reward (I never did figure it out, I eventually just gave up), and they're like "WE'RE UNDER ATTACK! WE'VE GOTTA EVACUATE!!"

I miss the old days of the WoW starting area. I for one don't need to feel like I'm a hero when I'm level ONE. The whole concept is absurd. I'm level ONE. Level ONE people don't save the day. They beat up boars and hope to one day BECOME a legendary hero.

So yeah, those explosions... they kinda hurt.

I was in a mission with a bunch of people, and that meant there were a BUNCH of enemy ships, as difficulty seems to scale with the number of people present. I flew in first, and I was getting so hammered that my shields dropped just as we took down one of them -- it exploded and reduced my health to 5%. As I was flying away, I noticed that my ship was on fire.

Luckily, I took advantage of the powers of my brand new engineering officer to do some emergency repairs on the shield, and all was well again.

No, I haven't been playing since my last post, this is just another of the random screenshots that I had from last time, that I totally forgot about before.

Now, I'm going to be busy with non-gaming stuff for a while -- for my birthday, dad got me the DS9 model kit (with fiber optic lighting system!) that hasn't been in production for many years. I had the non-fiber-optic version of it when I was a kid, and though I never really watched DS9 much, the opening music never failed to bring a tear to my eye, and the beautiful design of the spacestation itself made that my favorite model. I don't know what happened to that one (it was lost years ago, my memory fails when trying to figure out when), but now I shall go enjoy some nostalgia by building a new one. I'm going to need some model glue and a soldering iron....

So I played a bit more tonight, and didn't have any further issues with crashing and whatnot, this time being very careful to shut down any other programs running in the background -- like I said, WoW handles me running firefox, mediamonkey and skype in the background at the same time and alt-tabbing between them at will, but STO is in open beta and is considerably more unstable. Which makes me a little sad. The music in this game tends to be rather ignorable, and I was having more fun playing my own MP3s in the background.

Anyway, I zipped around, completing that mission I had crashed out of twice before, and the one after it, and then going on to complete my patrol of various star systems nearby.

Here's a pic of the first mission's system:

On the left side, a ship that's being attacked by space pirates. On the right side, an anomaly that I can loot. Ooh, sparklies. Ship under attack can wait -- for science!! *charges towards the anomaly*

And of course, they did wait, and here's a pic of the space combat:

Blow up the ship and it makes a HUGE explosion, with shockwaves and everything:

Though that pic is technically from a later mission, it took me a while before I could get a good shot with the shockwave in it.

I found a tribble in the ship I beamed over to, and found a creepy bug when I tried to let my best buddy Zara the Tactical Ensign use it:

Then we finish the mission, warp back to Sector Space, which is basically a galaxy map that you can fly around in, with exaggerated models of the various systems. Each system is an instanced mission, and I found the instanced nature of a number of these to be rather annoying.

In one, I flew in, was auto-joined with a group of other players, started flying around and shooting the enemies, and then the leader of the team booted me for no reason... I had to leave and rejoin in order to finish my mission.

Another mission had me flying around destroying pirate spacedocks all by myself -- it was a little time-consuming to do without any other ships to help.

A third mission had me and three other people escorting a mining ship that got lost in an asteroid belt back to the mining outpost. I've really got no clue why this required four people, since the freighter would only follow one person, and no enemy ships attacked. It was pretty much a quest of "wait around as the guy the ship randomly chose figures out how to use his map and flies in the right direction."

A fourth mission, which I enjoyed quite a bit, had me running around talking to several different people, and then the game basically quizzed me on what they had said, in order to prove that the federation cares about the problems facing the people of this world. I'm hoping to see more of those non-combat missions here. Blowing up ships is fun and all, but when I remember Star Trek, I remember them trying to AVOID conflict as much as possible.

I find myself wishing that instead of being an MMO, this could be a single-player game that takes place in a time period where flying around, exploring the galaxy and making friends with new, unknown races could actually work. But for the meantime, I don't think I'll be playing much more of the Star Trek beta. There's a ton of things to explore here, and while I do love testing it and helping them make the game better, I'd rather save the rest of the exploration for later, so that I'm not burned out on it when the game actually releases.

I'll leave you with one other picture. I got a third crewmember (I let him be Science just to be well-rounded) and he turned out to be a Male Of Unknown Species named Zar. This will not do, I say. My Tactical officer is already named Zara, I need to rename this guy. I was flipping through the Random name generator, cringing at the completely unpronounceable names it was giving me, trying to figure out who programmed these things. I mean, I know that he's an unknown species, but does his name have to be completely incomprehensible? One of the few that I could actually pronounce:

That's right. Ensign Gayer Coed, the Science Officer.

I was trying to figure out how to take screenshots that included the UI. Again, another failing that STO shares with Champions -- Sometimes I WANT to take a screenshot with the UI visible, did you ever think of THAT, Cryptic?? Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to take a screenshot of this, and I didn't want to lose the name, so... apparently, you can only rename your Bridge Officers once? It wouldn't let me rename him again afterwards, and didn't really explain why. I mean, why even let me open up that window if everything's just going to be grayed out? Why not just gray out the "Rename" button entirely? So... my Science Officer in the Open Beta shall forever be named Gayercoed.

Just skimming through Blue posts, and Daelo cheered me up:

"The incorrectly flipped levels on the two colors of Maraudon will be addressed in a future patch. I also fixed the maggot generator in Orange. Thanks for the reports."

Good to see that he isn't ignoring annoying bugs just because they're for low-level content.

...But when I tried to log in (last night I had crashed in the middle of the first mission they sent me out of stardock, to rescue some ship) the whole game froze immediately, disconnected me soon after, and then I probably spent a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to get the program to shut down, while my music player kept playing the same 15-second piece of "Different People" by No Doubt over and over and OVER again. I'm rather surprised that it didn't blue-screen. It made the noise it sometimes makes when it's about to, but it managed to hold together. *pats computer lovingly*

So, let me talk about my thoughts through the tutorial parts.

Firstly, the game DOES NOT take place in the timeline of the recent reboot movie, as I had originally assumed. It does take place in that same alternate universe, but instead it occurs in the future, about 30 years after the last Next Generation movie, at some point in the 25th century. I only discovered this when I asked Commander Akira Sulu who the hell he was, and he told me that his great-grandfather served with Kirk on the Enterprise. And then some people on General Chat started discussing stuff they read from the forums about the timeline of this game.

So the ship combat, as everyone else is saying, is quite fun and extremely different from any other MMO I've played. You basically have four shield sections (forward, left, right, and back, ignoring the fact that this is three-dimensional combat and you should really have an upper and lower shield too) and your weapons align rather nicely with these zones. Photon torpedos can only be fired at targets in front of you. The front phasers can be fired at targets in the front and sides, and back phasers can be fired at targets in the back and sides -- allowing you to overlap your two phasers by putting your side to the enemy. However, phasers are more effective against shields, while photon torpedoes are more effective against the ship after the shields fall -- and it's not so easy to turn your ship towards the enemy in time to finish them off with photon torpedoes after you've weakened their shields.

I thought ship combat was rather slow at first, but that's before they told me about Full Impulse power that let me zip around at high speed out of combat by diverting more power to the engines.

Now ground combat, I can see why people are saying the animations aren't that great, but it does FEEL rather fitting. The mechanics reward you for ducking down behind cover, for rolling to the side (flashbacks of Galaxy Quest, the rolling helps) and the combat throws the idea of having a resource out the window. Your attacks are only limited by their cooldowns, not by any kind of mana or energy you have to manage in the meantime. You have a health bar and a forcefield bar that acts like a second health bar, and regenerates quickly when you hide behind cover.

You also have a whole party of NPCs following you around. In the tutorial I just had the one officer following me around, but once I got out and on to the next mission (where I froze soon after) I had that officer plus several people labeled only as "Security" who exist only to fill out the group. In any other games, these "Bridge Officers" would be considered Pets. You can buy and sell them on the auction house (there's something vaguely disturbing about buying and selling people, even if they are just virtual people) and give them promotions and level up their skills, rename them (they come with randomized names) and give them their own backstories if you so desire. I am my own 5-man party, with little pet controls to get them to assist me, and ways to command them to walk somewhere specific if I'd like to get flanking bonuses for shooting at an enemy from multiple directions at once. All of your pets have special attacks based on whether they are engineering, science or tactical, and different strengths and weaknesses based on what species they are and what gear they have equipped.

I found a couple of anomalies, and they're apparently nothing more than gathering nodes -- you see it flashing, go over to it and press F, and you loot it for an item that you take back to starbase to use in some kind of crafting system to improve your gear. But I haven't actually explored that part, because my game crashed =(

Hopefully I'll be able to get back into the game soon. I'm hoping my issues are just being caused by my attempts to burn DVDs in the background while I play. WoW wouldn't have a problem with that, but STO is still rather unstable.

I'll probably talk later about the ship/ground combat in STO, but I wanted to take a moment now to mention something I meant to include when I was talking about the character creator last night: it is ANNOYING AS HELL to try to change anything, because my character is turning her head back and forth every couple of seconds.

I'm trying to adjust something like the width of her head, so I want to look at her head from the front. But no, she's turning her head back and forth like there's something fascinating moving around off in the distance that she has to watch. Forcing me to CONSTANTLY turn the model around to keep her oriented properly. The reason for this is that the character creator uses the same idle animations. I went through all of them in the body editor (thankfully there were more poses to choose from than there were in Champions) but in every single one of them, the character was constantly scanning the horizon, and my ability to edit minute details on her head was suffering because of it.

They need to either tweak the idle animations for the character creator, or give me a little pause button somewhere. The character creator has a lot of options, yes, but it pisses me the hell off because of this stupid animation issue.

Okay, that's all. It's out of my system now.

Overall, I like the game. It MIGHT just be related to the fact that I've been spending the past couple of months watching old Star Trek episodes.

Firstly, the menus etc. are obviously just copied from Champions, I recognize many things including the sucky auction house and the keybindings dialogue. Which obviously means that it has many of the same issues right off the bat -- you can't save keybindings between one character and the next; playing at higher resolutions makes the UI painfully small, but increasing the UI scale breaks a number of parts of the interface (the buttons that control my away team didn't scale properly, and overlapped each other); the button to cancel your target is the same one that brings up the game menu (though to be fair, that's a failing that even WoW still has), and I still have not figured out if there even is a way to use emotes that doesn't involve navigating several menus (there's an emote menu that lets you choose from a list, but trying to type that emote in chat just resulted in an "unknown command" error).

I do like the character creator quite a bit, though after all the hype I've heard, there was not as much customization as I was expecting. Sure, there are several dozen different types of ears to choose from, but what does it matter when the vast majority of them are horrifically ugly? I smirked to myself about the ease at which you can create night elves in STO, since there are long, pointy ears as well as extra-long eyebrows and face tattoos.

I rather like the character I made. You see, when I was a child, I considered myself quite an artist, because I favored the romantic notions associated with such people. But I have since discovered that in truth, I am a scientist, discovered that I am not so much creative as precise. Even though my career is not traditionally science-based, being able to use the scientific method to narrow down my understanding of some elusive glitch fills me with great joy. Combine this with the fact that my most cherished times in WoW were playing as a healer, and I feel a certain amount of serendipity that the Science Officer class in Star Trek Online is the healing class. I mean, it makes sense, because they're the doctors as well, but the way this concept meshes with game mechanics feels very harmonious. The fact that I identify this strongly with the class probably means I'm never even going to THINK about creating one of the others, despite my strong altoholic tendencies.

Meet Lieutenant Kiryn Silverwing, though technically when I took this picture she was still only an Ensign a few minutes in to the tutorial.

I'll finish this tomorrow. I'm tired and I wanna go to sleep =P

A most amusing thing just happened. Khoa tells me not to feed the trolls, but this conversation was just too amusing, and I really couldn't resist.

One of my serious pet peeves as a warrior tank is when people attack things before I have a chance to. It means that I can't build any rage, and things end up running around willy-nilly attacking other people until I can scrape together the rage to get them off everybody.

The scene is:

I queue for a random run (warrior level 47 now woot) and end up in an in-progress Sunken Temple almost immediately.

They're standing near the stairs, and apparently already cleared half the place and were going up to the dragon section. Cool by me. I follow them up. We start clearing out dragons.

We get to Jammalan's area. The place with the trolls who fear and turn into ghosts and chase you around (though the ghosts don't seem to do nearly as much damage as I remember) and I was doing my best to pull the mobs back so that we won't get feared into the rest of them and pull half the room.

But of course, there's this warrior in the group who seems to make it his personal mission to charge straight into each group I pull when it isn't even halfway to where I'm standing and thunderclap, forcing me to run up and try to salvage the pull... then trying to say that it wasn't his fault he pulled the next group because he was feared. I kindly warned him once or twice that he should wait for the mobs to get to me before he attacks them.

Our rogue has to leave suddenly, so I keep pulling as our replacement feral druid tries to find her way to us. During the last pull, surprise surprise, the warrior charges at the mobs before they get to me and gets feared all the way into the boss.

I know I should have resisted, but it was just too much fun.

Replacement feral druid apparently ran into some dragons on the way to us, which doesn't surprise me since Dreamscythe and his buddy spawn as soon as we kill Jammalan. Rather than stick around in this obviously incompetent group, he left.

This other replacement player left after listening to us argue for a bit as well -- we ended up 4-manning the rest of the place because I declined the queue, I didn't want to put anyone else through this madness.

He shut up after this and didn't say another word for the rest of the run. Whether in a "oh. oops" or a "whatever, I'm not gonna argue with this noob any more" I can't be certain. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping he'd put up more of a fight. I guess I'm a little bit of a troll myself. *cackle* I'm rather pleased that this entire exchange was still in my chat log at the end of the run.

Well, I don't expect to be entertained by Star Trek Online for more than a month or so, but I've gotta do my proper research on the competition, so I've deactivated my account preemptively, so that I won't get billed automatically next month. I'll keep playing my alts until then, of course. I'll probably preorder STO at some point soon, since I fully intend to actually buy it, I might as well get the goodies that most likely come with said preorder.

In the meantime, I've been trying my best to play as many of my characters as possible, flitting between my warrior, priest, hunter and warlock willy-nilly. I'll probably end up spending the rest of my 20k gold buying epic flying mounts for another few characters before Cataclysm hits. For now, I'm trying my best to remember where my abilities are, and upgrading my gear with liberal use of Pawn. Who can be bothered to remember the relative values of crit vs. haste on four different characters at the same time? I'm sure there's quite a bit of error in my calculations due to differences in level, talents and overall intent of play (I don't intend to raid, after all, so that's quite a bit of error) but I find it much more fun to just trust the approximate stat weightings on Wowhead and not stress too much about getting the very best possible gear down to a few decimal places.

A strange thing happened to me last night. My hunter was running Nexus, a death knight had gone AFK, and we were sitting around before the first boss waiting for him to come back. All of a sudden, I found myself back in Borean Tundra. I have no idea what happened. I wasn't vote-kicked, it said "you have been removed from the group" and the run previous to that had been quite friendly. I was topping the dps meters, hadn't said much other than helping out when people didn't know which way to go. I'm truly baffled.

I left two groups today, both for Mara: Waterfall.

In the first, I dropped into the water to see the druid healer running away at high speed towards the hydras. I manage to save him, and the first thing he does is start spamming Wrath on them, and does not stop DPSing until the hydra is dead and I'm at half health. He then tosses a Rejuv on me.

Oh well, no matter, I don't take that much damage anyway, and as long as he heals me when I need it, I don't really care if he DPSes or not -- I DPS on my priest as long as the tank is topped off, after all.

But when I ran towards the next pull of dimetrodons, and he's standing right next to me, I inform him that he needs to stand farther away, because they silence.

He doesn't move at all. He doesn't cast anything. He doesn't even jump around like an idiot. We kill the dimetrodons, and the rock elementals path in around that time, and we kill them too. I barely take any damage, so after all this I'm only around half health. The healer still isn't moving. I take a step, and notice that he apparently has me on follow.

So I stand there, and say in party chat "I'm not moving until I know my healer is paying attention." Though I couldn't vote kick him, we only just started. Rather than wait the ten minutes it would take for the debuff to wear off so that we could find a healer who was actually present, I left the group and read some blogs for a while.

But my second story here is much more juicy.

Things went quite smoothly until we killed the first boss, Landslide. As I was walking down the slope to continue on, I noticed that the healer and two of the DPS had taken a LOT of damage, and were reduced to around 40% health. The healer was topping them off, and I realized as I continued running down that they had jumped off. I got to the next pull (with the warlock following me instead) with the priest, rogue and hunter still back where they had jumped.

The priest caught up with me and I pulled the next group, while asking them why they had jumped, trying to figure out the logic there. I noticed after I pulled that the rogue and hunter were somewhere else, getting themselves killed as they most likely aggroed something by running down the wrong path on the way back.

When I questioned the fact that it took them LONGER to get there because they jumped, the priest told me to "shut up and tank". I did not feel like I had to put up with that kind of abuse, so I left.

While I was in the middle of writing this blog post, I got a very angry whisper. I can only imagine what must have happened after I left to prompt that kind of response.

This is the reason I keep the profanity filter turned on.

Today's failpug story comes from Zul'Farrak, and my warrior.

The instant I load the place, the hunter, named Hëädhünter (I repeat his name here, as I repeat the names of all people who piss me off spectacularly), said that if "Sang" dropped, he gets it. I was this () close to asking him what a hunter would want with a parry sword, but since I didn't particularly want it myself due to my heirloom sword, I made a weird face at the screen and let him alone. (After looking at his armory later, I have to ask "why do so many otherwise more or less smartly-geared hunters go after such idiotic melee weapons?")

He then proceeded to demand Might. The adorable dwarf priestess pointed out to him that there was no paladin in the group. I pointed out to him that he already had Battle Shout, which is the same thing. The priestess and I became fast friends over the next few pulls.

Behold! Actual screenshots! I'll try to get more of these.

We got to that intersection where you can choose to go left to Gahz'rilla or right to Antu'sul, and for the past few pulls, the hunter has been pretty much standing around doing nothing, with an "I'll just wait for them to kill stuff and I won't have to do any work!" apparent mentality. The pulls around there were tricky, and we kept aggroing a few more, and a few more, and a few more. The rogue ended up aggroing a pull over on the left path, and we headed that way to clear them out. The hunter was facing away from us, and started actually yelling at us to follow him.

I had attempted to vote kick him, but it wouldn't let me because he had run off towards the boss he wanted to fight OMGRITENAO and got us in combat again, and for SOME REASON it won't let you vote kick someone while in combat.

(And yes, I do keep the profanity filter turned on. I believe that profanity should be saved for times when it is really important, or it'll lose its impact and you'll have to keep inventing new ones -- I see no reason why I should have to look at other people's typed profanity if I can so easily avoid it.)

Our replacement was a very nice feral druid who ended up popping out of form to hurricane quite frequently due to how many mobs I was normally pulling. The priestess decided to pop her dual spec and spend the rest of the run as shadow, since I didn't really need to be healed anyway, and it went wonderfully.

The stairs, yet again, went as a "pull everything at the bottom, wait for it to respawn, then AoE it down a second time" and I wonder if this will become standard procedure in my groups from now on. I could get used to something like that, it's a serious rush to tank two dozen mobs at once, even if they are nonelites.

After the stairs though, we sent the goblin off to blast open the door (wowhead informs me that Weegli Blastfuse is the only mob in the game with "stfu" in his name) I talk to Sergeant Bly to start the fight. People are like, does anyone have the quest? No? Why are we killing them?

And I had to stop and think to myself... doesn't he drop a blue or something? I could have sworn he was considered a boss fight. I could have sworn one of my alts got a blue polearm from him once. (Though looking it up now, we probably just forgot to loot the shadowpriest until after we fought Bly and I just assumed it dropped from him) I've never come to Zul'Farrak and NOT killed him. Poor Sergeant Bly. I betray him every time I come here and I don't even know why I'm doing it any more!

(Not that I ever knew, apart from "he's the leader of a strange cross-faction party of adventurers and the goblins wanted me to get something from him")

We did wipe on Gahz'rilla, but that was due to my own ego, the waves of Shadow Hunters that aggroed on me because I was confident that we didn't NEED to clear out the rest of the mobs nearby. I spent less time tanking that fight and more time either frozen in a solid block of ice or hopping on the ground as a frog. Lesson learned.

So I was a little sick of tanking Mara Orange, so I decided to go play my mage. You know, the one I haven't played in forever and can't decide what spec to make her, and as my lowest level character, the top of the list for deleting in favor of a worgen when Cataclysm comes out. Though that really depends on the worgen female casting animations. The worgen male ones I've seen are pretty bleh, with them waving their arms around like they're treading water or something.

So I logged on to my mage, tossed some points in frost, and queued for a random LFG. I got placed in Wailing Caverns, which made me think about how the alliance can now run Ragefire Chasm effortlessly by teleporting there via the LFG, I wonder how many people will level their characters with no concept that Ragefire Chasm is in Orgrimmar?

So this Wailing Caverns run was In Progress. And the existing party members were in combat. And not doing so well. The druid tank was dying, and yelling for heals on chat. The druid tank dies, the rogue dies shortly after, and when I catch up to where they are (west side, on the way to Cobrahn) the warrior is running towards me. I start frostbolt kiting the snake, and manage to kill it, but the warrior (queued as DPS, but protection-specced with a shield, if that makes any sense) dies from the other snake. The resto shaman is running away too, so I manage to finish off the other snake and leave the healer alive.

Healer rezzes everyone, and we continue up. Rogue says he'll sap something and put up a skull when he's ready. He saps something, the mob that he saps has a skull on it. Bear promptly says "whats sap" and runs in and breaks it. After we kill them, the rogue lays into the druid about how you should never break his sap, the druids can heal and we need all the CC we can get. I remark to the rogue that in most groups, skull = kill. He changes his macro to an X.

So we continue on, waiting patiently for the rogue to go in and sap things, with me thinking "I'm a mage... it's a lot easier for me to just sheep things." but the few times I try, people just go up and break it.

This whole time, the healer is yelling at us to loot the snakes so he can skin them. He just stands there over the dead mobs and calls out whoever needs to loot it. The rest of the group runs on to the next pull, I'm sitting there near the mobs, drinking, with every intention to loot it once I'm done drinking, and he's like "MAGE! Loot the f***ing sneak!" and I'm like "God, chill for a second, I'm still drinking!" The warrior, who needs to loot the other snake, runs back to the shaman, /dances in his direction, then runs away without looting the snake. This continued for EVERY pull that had something skinnable in it.

In one pull, I notice the druid tank popping out of bear form, while something is attacking him, to cast Starfire on it.

Me: Umm, druid, you should probably stay in bear form while tanking. Popping out of form to cast Starfire doesn't really help you at all.
Warrior: *runs off and pulls the next group of mobs*
Druid: *doesn't move*
Me: *helps the warrior fight a snake, but pulls aggro with one frostbolt*
Snake: NOM! *reduces me to 10% HP*
Druid: *doesn't move*
Rogue: *finally kills the mob that I was "tanking"*
Druid: ok
Me: God, who's tanking this?
Druid: Me
Me: Yes, I know it SAYS you're the tank.
Me: I nearly got eaten by that snake because nobody was tanking it.
Druid: u have to tell me these things
Druid: i cant see everything
Me: It was standing on top of you!
Me: You weren't doing anything at all!

So we continued on some more.

We got to the place with the druids and shamblers... Rogue sapped one druid, and we pulled the shambler, when the bear ran in to kill the druid, the other druid nearby aggroed, so I sheeped it. It actually stayed unmolested for the rest of the fight, which was surprising for a while, until it was the only mob left and the druid ran on down the hallway.

Me: Hey druid!
Me: Come back!
Me: Where are you going? There's one more mob left!
Me: What, are CCd mobs invisible now?
Druid: sorry, thought they were all dead
Conversation: *devolves into talking about how fail this group is*
Me: The only reason I haven't left this group and put you all on my ignore list is that this is going to make a great failpug story for my blog later.
Warrior: whats the address for your blog? i wanna read it
Me: HELL no.

(Yes, I tend to talk a lot in instance groups)

Later on, the shaman died because a group of those little tiny lashers aggroed on him... we had to remind the druid to rez him, because he was the only one with a rez spell and he was already moving on to the next group, telling the rogue to sap something. I'm sure he would have followed that pull with a "HAELS" as he did every other time his health dipped below about half. Oh yeah, and I should probably also mention that his guild name was spelled in alternating caps and made some reference to ur mom.

Later on... (this one is a direct quote, as I still had it in my chat log afterwards)
Shaman: link DPS meee
Druid: *tells the rogue to sap something*
Shaman: link dps meter
Druid: *specifies to the rogue that he should sap "the chik"*
Me: I'd rather not.
Shaman: LINK DPS METER
Me: NO.
Shaman: why
Rogue: sapping
Me: Because if you care so much about dps when you're the HEALER, maybe you should install the mod yourself.
Rogue: sapped
Rogue: gonna have to sheep the other one
Shaman: lol

After we killed Pythas, there was a pull with three druids, some shamblers and a ton of little lashers... the rogue stealthed over to sap one of the druids, but hit evasion instead of sprint, broke his own stealth, and rapidly got eaten by mobs. I managed to sheep one of them, but it wasn't enough, the healer died in the chaos and I was dead soon after. "As amusing as this fail is, I don't have time for this right now. Later!" Quit group.

But you know, karma. I was standing out near the graveyard when I left the group, so as I was not in an instance, I did not get teleported back to where I was before entering the instance. I was sitting there dead near the graveyard in the Barrens. It was at this point that I remembered that this mage was my bank/auction alt for quite some time, and as such, she had deleted her hearthstone ages ago.

So my level 19 mage is stranded here in Ratchet. With no hearthstone, no teleport spells, no flight points (she's only ever been to Azuremyst and Bloodmyst) and not even a mount or Blink to let her run back to where she should be a little faster. I had been planning on putting everyone in that group on my ignore list (either for being a moron, being annoying, and/or for doing obscene things to corpses before rezzing them) and making a macro for my sheep so that it'll mark the thing I'm sheeping with a symbol of some kind. Maybe at this point it would be easier to just delete this character like I was planning to do before.

There, now everything of value that she's still stocking has been transferred to the guild bank. Mage... deleted.

Well, my warrior got up to the level where I'm being tossed into Orange Mara a ton, which infuriates me because of the two major bugs with the place. The first one being the level disparity, which not only throws level 40-41 players into a place with level 46 bosses, but also apparently causes the loot bags I get from running the place on random to be the lower-level ones instead. I got sent to a Mara Purple a couple days ago, and it gave me the iLevel 55 boots instead of the iLevel 45 shoulders. I'm convinced that the levels for Purple and Orange got switched, since the bosses (sorry, boss, there's only one, as neither of the two earlier sides send you to kill Celebras and I'm pretty sure the third section starts you past the waterfall) in Purple are lower level.

The other bug, of course, being the stupid larva that respawns forever. I actually had a groupmate a couple runs ago who said it wasn't a bug, it just respawns infinitely. As it is my JOB to find bugs in video games, I took this personally and took a moment to explain it to him. It is a BUG because you can attack the tube they come out of just like you used to, and kill said tube, just as you used to, but as soon as it dies it kinda... dies in reverse, and spits out a new larva. If this were working as intended, then either you could kill it and it would stay dead, or you wouldn't be able to attack it in the first place.

Though the random dungeon finder did send me to Zul'Farrak yesterday. And something awesome happened. We were on the stairs, doing the event, and we were waiting for the mobs to come up the stairs. And the boomkin just kinda... ran up and Hurricaned all the mobs at the bottom. I thought to myself "HOLY CRAP" and ran over, thunderclapping and hitting my AoE taunt and shield wall and it was GLORIOUS. I said in party chat when it was over "WOW I always wanted to do that but never had the nerve to try!" and the boomkin was all "happy to help!" I wandered around the bottom cleaning up the last few when a big huge group of mobs respawned and aggroed on me. Again, it was GLORIOUS.

But speaking of bugs, I checked out Allods Online due to all of the people talking about it lately. I find myself somewhat confused by a number of parts of it.

When I first started it up, the character selection screen confused me. It had like, classes on one side, and equivalent classes on the other side as the other faction, as part of the background artwork that had been displaying to me during loading. It would give me a short description of what types of things each class could do, and which races could play those classes.

But it didn't mark out which of those races was being displayed here (I don't see why they have to give the humans of either side such weird race names) so I discovered that my character's looks are very important to me. When starting a brand new game that I barely know anything about, race is most important, followed by class and then faction. Don't ask me to pick my faction first. I don't have any idea what that means!

How do I pick a class that can be one of two races if I don't know what either of those races looks like? I mean, it says that Kanians and Elves can be paladins, but what race is that girl in the top corner with the fairy wings? I eventually discovered that "Elves" means magical fairy-winged people that hover slightly off the ground (rather than foresty-sneaky-people with long ears), and "Kanians" means good-aligned humans. Of the other faction, the Xana-whatevers are the evil-aligned humans, orcs look rather more like the Warhammer orcs if anything, and the Arisen I assume are supposed to be some kind of undead, but they look more like the jedi-droids from star wars. I'm not sure what's going on with them... it's not giving me any kind of backstory for any of these races. Just saying "here! Pick one!"

So I ended up going with an elven paladin (named Kareja like my draenei paladin in WoW, it has more personal meaning to it ever since I discovered it was also the name of a major character in Shelters of Stone, and Jean M Auel picked the name for the same reason I did) and jumped off into the starting area.

The first thing I notice is that this game needs a better localization team. Which doesn't surprise me, really. My time in QA has taught me that even the testers who are hired for their knowledge of English rarely catch run-on sentences and other more complicated issues. My god, that first quest dialogue could probably have used at least another half-dozen commas. The voiceovers for the story parts were kinda neat, though jarring when the VO didn't match the text that was displayed in the chat log at the same time.

I learned a few attacks automatically when going through the starting area, attempting to read them between combats. First of all, I apparently have to manually hit my basic attack, it uses a global cooldown. It took me a while of wondering why I was killing things so slowly until I figured out that my character wasn't attacking unless I specifically told her to. I have a second attack that puts a "Mark of the Pariah" on my target. I can't figure out what the hell that does, if anything. It doesn't seem to have any effect other than being a type of combo point for my third attack, which "detonates" my Marks of the Pariah to deal damage, give me energy, and slow the target for a certain duration.

Because oh yeah, my paladin is apparently a rogue. Combo points? Check. Finishing move that deals more damage based on how many combo points I've accumulated? Check. Energy as a resource type? Check. I don't know if this is specific to the paladin, or if all classes use this same mechanic. I haven't tried out the other classes yet, though I assume the others use mana, since I found some spring water that apparently restores mana.

I haven't learned any heals yet, but I see some in my talent panel. There's one that heals a certain amount, and costs two "Canons" and another that I can use outside of combat that restores ten "Canons". I have no idea what these Canons are, and the game doesn't really see fit to enlighten me. Are they some kind of healing surges or something?

Also, I find the lack of a mini map slightly disturbing. All I get is this little arrow in the corner where the map is supposed to be, and it tells me which way is north. That isn't really helpful for navigation.

I just have to wonder. Why "Allods"? I mean, I understand its connection to the storyline, as "Allods" are apparently the void islands that float in the Astral Sea. But why did they pick that particular nonsense word? It doesn't really have a nice ring to it. It doesn't make me want to find out more about the game. It just makes me go "that's a really weird name" and possibly avoid the game because of its strange name. Kinda like that french browser MMO named Dofus. Maybe Allods meant something to the Russians. I figure they would have picked a better name for their American release.

More localization stuff, I've been picking up random greens that are named "Noun Adjective of the Noun" which probably makes sense in Russian, but in English just leads to "Slippers Damaged of the Wizard" and "Jacket Battered of the Bloodletter". Those are two items in my bags right now. I completely understand that placement of text variables makes fixing this a non-trivial task, but surely they could have done SOMETHING about it.

Though I do like how it highlights the stats that are good for my class and even tells me so in my character panel, saying "This stat is very useful for your class" in green on the tooltip, and highlighting the good stats on items, as well, so I can just compare the parts in green and kinda ignore the rest. It does make it a lot easier to learn a new class if the game outright tells me "these are the stats you want" right on the items. Though I have yet to figure out how much each one is comparatively worth, that comes with time.

Edit: Oh yeah, one other thing I forgot to mention. What's with the decimal numbers on my attacks? Why does my secondary attack deal 6.8 to 11.4 damage? I've never actually seen myself deal decimal amounts of damage, so why doesn't it just say "7 to 11"? Why do they have to make it complicated like that?