The Angry Guild Leader

But then, he never had to file a Form 1040.

Though WOTLK is taking most of the spotlight here recently, the buzz on the street right seems to be guild tax. Yes, in the near future your guild leader might be able to tax a percentage of your earnings within the game. Some are up in arms about this, and some say it’s a saving grace.

What do I say? It’s about damn time.

Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan has responded, saying that it “was an interesting idea” and they’re considering options for improving guild administration, but there was no way they could program a change like this in time for Wrath.

I think Grig from Winterspring made a great point in regards to taxation. He says, “So, Blizzard is considering taking one of the most universally loathed concepts from real life and adding it to a game. Why, they’d be silly not to do it.”

I must admit that I agree. But, remember, this is coming from a guild leader’s viewpoint.

While I will do my best to explain why I think that this is a fabulous idea, I will also attempt to play devil’s advocate.

I suppose that I will attempt to do the latter first. Those of you who don’t already hate me probably will by the time I am done. By the time I am done, most of you will be convinced that I punch babies in my spare time, and eat delicious old people for breakfast. MMM… old people.

Okay, so the idea of a guild tax will make some players more nervous than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. This is to be expected. The players we are talking about are the casual players. Those who either don’t have the time to farm for cash, or worse, the initiative.

We can tackle initiative first: You have no sympathy from me, please move along.

Work, family time, wife aggro? That’s a little more acceptable of an excuse. This is when it comes down to what kind of guild you are in, or want to be in.

Let’s face it, if you just do a few instances a week and a few quests or dailies when you get home from working all day, then it might actually hurt you when it comes to taxation. Certainly, a 3% tax may not break you, but it’s that much more you aren’t making when you put your best effort into questing, or however you make your money. I suppose this is when it breaks down to what do you expect from your guild. Or even better, what does your guild do for you.

If you are in a casual guild that never raids, this might be the only way the guild can make money. But, what do they really do with that money? If you have some creative leaders, they might put together events or contests, or even arrange for repairs for all members. Odds are, however, if you are in a small guild, there isn’t as much use for cash flow like there would be in a larger guild, or even worse a raiding guild.

Continue reading “George Washington never told a lie…”

I now have two copies of Lich in my possession. Both were purchased at 7-11 around lunch time today. I also went to two other locations to try to secure more for my secondary accounts and my brother-in-law. Unfortunately, one lady wouldn’t sell it before the release date (which she claimed is tomorrow morning) and the second had no clue what I was talking about.

From what I am gathering, each store only got 2 copies or so of the game.

It looks like Blizzard has shipped WOTLK to stores. There is a report of a player in Australia who ordered the CE and actually got his edition shipped to him already.  Of course, the game installs. Does it run yet? No.

Most Gamestops have confirmed that they have their copies in store and ready.

And, the best news of all? 7-11 (notorious for suddenly selling games, and then very recently selling them early) is reported to be selling the game already. In fact, I’m heading over there at lunch.

We’ve had a few drama bumps lately.

First, I’ve trimmed down the guild. This is to get rid of dead weight. We’ve had a rash of people lately who wanted to join, as we’ve had some mediocre success, and we are one of the few guilds that only raid on weekends (likely to change soon). I’ll recruit, they’ll answer and say, “Great! Weekends! I can show to everyo raid!” However, most times, they join and we never hear from them again. We are also going to be more focused, efficient, and definitely more hardcore. There is a vacuum in guilds at the moment on our server, and that probably holds true for all others. Beta, Lich, Warhammer, Economy… It’s all adding up.

The second was a mage that was angry in SSC that her sheeps were being broken (by a hunter that shouldn’t have been breaking them), and last a druid that showed up late for a raid and thought we should have waited for him, and said that it was too late for us to invite him into the raid once he logged.

Well, even with this, I am glad to see we are still pretty drama free. From the report from Guild Watch below, it seems there’s a lot of crazy shizzle going on with other guilds:

DRAMA

• Handlebarz walked away with the Dragonspine Trophy from a Gruul run, and when people called out his guild, Vital on Dark Iron, guildies show up to say that Handle wasn’t in the guild any more. It was true, he’d even applied to another guild, and apparently someone from Vital showed up on that application to trash him as well. We don’t know who started it — Vital says Handlebarz was a bad guildie, he says they were a crappy guild. But we do know that even after he was kicked, Handle stole that trinket, Getting kicked due to guild drama doesn’t give you the right to screw someone else over.
• Prodigy of Llane, who gave us the “25man raid lf24m” title way back when, has apparently rerolled again. As Preeminent, over on Medivh. Our tipster says they move from server to server picking up loot and then ditching guildies when the loot stops coming.
• Ten guilds kicked me in a row, and exams are about to start, so I need an answer fast. What? Requiem of EU Arathor is full on Hunters? Time for me to go nuts!
• Vision on EU Turalyon had a little dustup and ended up /gkicking the guy who ran their webserver. Not a great decision, though, if you want to keep your webserver running.
• This drama thread about The Firm on Ravencrest is mesmerizing. At the center of it is a story that’s not all that great: the guildleader is on extended vacation, and the guild is just kind of disintegrating, but all of the nastiness coming out of it is pretty incredible to watch.
• Audacity on Sentinels-A has been going through a rough patch lately — the GM passed off control of the guild to Eluithyin, who then demoted the GM and his girlfriend to not even officer status. Since then, several healers have left, as well as others, and things are looking bad for the guild in general.
• Unfortunately, the OP deleted his post on this thread (it’s still in quotes farther down the page), so we don’t know which guild did this (SnD?) but it’s pretty sad — the guy picked up a wand on a Sunwell trash run outside of the guild, and the next night, when the guild found out about it, they charged him DKP for it. That’s right — they charged him DKP for an item he got outside of a guild run. He also paid 3000g for the wand to win it from someone who beat him in a roll, but we don’t really have a problem with that — if you have the money to do it, more power to you. But charging DKP for an item won completely outside of anything your guild does for you? Someone in SnD is on a power trip, and they should turn that car right around and go home.
• Poor Horror on Exodar can’t seem to shake his reputation. He ninja’ed a bunch of stuff from the guild bank of Resolute, and then tried to blame his actions on his “little brother” — a classic MMO ploy. Then he tried to get into a new guild with a name change, but it didn’t even get a few posts in before he got called out. We wonder if he knew what the consquences would be when he first grabbed the stuff — did he think after the “little brother” thing that people would happily let him back into the endgame?
• Unfortunately, the forum posts all got deleted, but lots of people emailed us about the story of Kayleepearl (a guy playing a female character) and Savannahmarie of Elune, who apparently played WoW together while in a real life relationship, and eventually had a kid together. Except, as the story goes, Savannah eventually decided she’d be happier with some other guys from the guild, left Kaylee and the kid, and then there was some account stealing, guild drama, and lots of other shenanigans. Kaylee’s RL mom apparently even showed up in the thread to defend her son and what a good kid he is. In our humble opinion, it’s probably all fake, but it’s too bad the threads were deleted. They’d probably make for some good reading.

The masters of World of Warcraft recently held the Blizzard Community Summit. One of the things discussed was the guild system. This is a long time coming. For years other games had a guild bank, and we finally got one after 3 years (and even still it’s pitifully small). They are now finally talking about other issues, such as ranks. I guess it took a Hammer to get that one across to them. Pun intended.

They said that while the team feels the new calendar feature added with Wrath of the Lich King offers a lot of new possibilities to guild planning and organization, there is still work to be done.  To that end, there are ideas being tossed around related to Guild Ratings, where a guild receives a rating based on their PvE and PvP accomplishments.

This is great, and will help coheision in a guild, but how about announcing to the guild when someone levels or receives loot? This is something EQ2 has had forever, and it REALLY makes a guild gel. THis is something very simple they could add. Hell, they’ve even added announcements in guild when someone gets an achievement, why not a level or epic loots?

Oh well, at least some changes are coming. Can we get a guild cloak, or maybe a tabard that doesn’t look like everyone elses now?

I know my readers have been wondering where i’ve gone as of late. I do apologize, but this is because I have been working for the worst boss you could imagine, and I don’t say that lightly. In fact, a lot of my time has been going to that blog which can be read here.

If you think your job sucks, read the Blog Of John, and leave your comments. Blog of John is updated VERY often, because we believe my boss to be bi-polar, so things are hectic and change every five minutes.

Early this year at E3, EA CEO John Riccitielo alluded to the fact that the new Bioware game is a MMORPG.
There is a pending announcement forthcoming. Let’s hope that this is the KOTOR we’ve been waiting for.

Well, I wouldn’t quite say dead. Even Anarchy Online is still around after one of the most abysmal launches of MMOG history. I am sure that AOC will stick around for some time to come; like so many others, it will remain a dirty corked bottle in the ocean of battling online games.

But, ladies and germs, the proof is in the pudding. Funcom’s value since the release of AOC has all but plummeted. The stock, which hit a high of 54 USD on launch day, has dwindled into the low 20s. This is only $3 more than the stock was worth before Conan. What does this mean? It means that the investors have gotten their money back (and I would guess substantially more), and they are running like screaming bitches.  They no longer see this game as retaining any sort of longevity, let alone high subs. The indestructible titan of MMORPGs Age of Conan is not.

Even as trolls, flamers, and fanboys continue to bolster, with little or no success, people need only look at the stock prices. You and I can only go by what employees of Funcom or the blinded say in forums. While that may be the case, these stock prices are nearly as good as DNA evidence in a murder trial when it comes to what is transpiring at Funcom.

Continue reading “Ding Dong, the Conan’s Dead…”

Don’t get me wrong. The awards this year are not about being vindictive. In fact, I could give a rat’s ass about Diablo 3, but what I do care about is elitist pricks who want to throw their weight around simply because they can hide behind a computer screen. No one seems to do anything about this for the normal, sane players of any game, so we dedicate this year’s awards to these very type of jackasses.

Even when I had been guessing that the splash screens on Blizzard’s site were for Diablo III for a few weeks, I stated that if I were wrong, I would be the first to post that here on the site. Not saying I told you so, I had merely accessed all of the data that others were coming up with in regards to the viral marketing, and came to a conclusion.  That conclusion happened to be right. This is something that anyone could have done, but what I didn’t do was insult people who had their own opinions. Furthermore, I certainly didn’t think I had all the answers. Again, I don’t care too much about Diablo 3, but this was the logical conclusion that I came to.

These awards aren’t for everyone. Sure a lot of people thought it was this game or that, just as I did. We are all entitled to our opinion. If you thought it was Lost Vikings Online, then more power to you. These awards go to the worthless bags of filth that seem to think they know more than everyone else. These putrescent masses of walking (or typing?) vomit had the nerve to believe that they, above all others, knew everything there was to know in the universe, and even more so when it comes to game announcements. These degenerate, noxious and depraved cowards even had the nerve to insult others who didn’t have the vast amount of intelligence that these witty wonders had exhausted to come up with the conclusion that it was a game that was already announced, and was being announced AGAIN! This about being rude, elitist, and treating others as beneath you, when in retrospect, your opinion fell flatter than Limp Bizkit’s last CD.

There are going to be people upset with these posts. Don’t let that discourage you. These are the trolls, and like infant children left without the bottle that is their ego and the warm blanket that is their avenue of expression, they always cry loudest. They don’t want people to stand up to them, they don’t want to be exposed, and you will even start to see them stick up for each other. And I don’t mean people that just disagree, it will be evident who these people are.

Of course, the trolls will inevitably say that this is the pot calling the kettle black. That I call anyone a troll who doesn’t agree with my opinion. Beware these words, this is a true troll at work. Sorry, try again.. Epic Fail.  Again, I merely expressed my opinion, as did thousands of other people. The difference being that we didn’t claim to be the sole answer to what was transpiring.

Continue reading “About Trolls & This Years Awards”

It is time for the 2008 Jackass Awards. This year they are in regards to the recent splash pages posted by Blizzard Entertainment to stir up interest in the release of Diablo 3. Now don’t get me wrong. This is not about being vindictive. In fact, I could give a rat’s ass about Diablo 3, but what I do care about is elitist pricks who want to throw their weight around simply because they can hide behind a computer screen.

These are the posters who were not only were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the game being announced was not Diablo 3, but their posts were nothing short of egotistical, snotty, and in most cases, just plain insulting to others who were debating the topic. Moderators seem to do nothing about this type of abusive behavior for the normal, sane players of any game, so we dedicate this year’s awards to these very type of jackasses.

The only thing worse than their delusional self-important statements of unknowing is their manners. I can’t say enough about these self-appointed, egotistical, balls of slime who have the appeal of walrus shit on a plate. However, I believe if I say anymore,  I will find myself in a corner, applying paper cuts to my eyelids.

If you know of a jackass that’s been missed and deserves to be mentioned here, by all means leave a post with a link to the thread.

Please keep in mind that the runners up were not necessarily found to be jackasses or rude, they were just entirely too full of themselves.

Without further ado, the douche bags of 2008:

Continue reading “The 2008 Jackass Awards ~ Diablo III”