To start, I just want to outline for anyone who reads this stuff how I utilize this blog tied in with other social media. Basically this site is for the big posts; my long rants, topics worthy of detailed expression, and so on. I use Google+ for the quick topics, stuff thats on my mind and doesnt really require a lengthy posting by yours truly, and finally Twitter for the stuff thats in my head randomly when I actually feel like sharing those thoughts. Most of the time I keep them under lock and key so I’m not committed, hehe. So hopefully that kind of puts things better into perspective for why I sometimes go a bit of time between posts on here. There are times which I want to, but just cant get the time. Running a WoW guild is a lot of work, especially when you run the raids, and you pair that with everyday life bullshit and well…one can get tired pretty easy and forget to share ones thoughts with the world.

I’ll preface the rest of this blog entry with the statement of I do not think I have it harder than anyone else, or that in fact my life is SOOOOO exciting or important that I absolutely have to share it with the Internet populace. I am simply sharing with friends and readers who visit here (few as they may be). Random passers by are welcome to the info too, always up for making new friends.

So anyway, back to the last few months of my life and the chaos that it has been…

Family Drama…yea…fuck that. So not eager to go through that bullshit again. I have a lot of petty jealousy in my family apparently and sadly didn’t realize it before because up until about 4-5 yrs ago, I really didn’t spend a lot of time around my family. Growing up was…well…chaotic as well and didn’t really afford me the opportunity to be around cousins, aunts and uncles. I was sorta nearby but without giving specific details of why (not comfortable airing all that detail to EVERYONE just yet), I just didn’t get to spend a lot of time getting to know any of them at all. Because of that I kind of grew up an outsider. After High School I was off and out on my own (couldn’t wait with my shit childhood) and I really didn’t come back home much, even for holidays. I think I would come back a Christmas here and there for like 2 to 3 days and I was gone again. My career was my priority when I got out of the Military, and when I was in, well anyone who’s served knows you don’t exactly get to use leave time whenever you want it, things have to be approved, you have to schedule, and if your unit is full of assholes or decides to deploy or something kiss that planned leave goodbye.

At any rate I basically had it out with some aunts and uncles in my family as well as a few cousins who I just can’t stand anymore. Spending the last 5 years getting to know them better, or in actually TRYING to get to know them better but failing due to their distancing from me, I finally ended up in a situation which thrust me into a position where I ended up defending my character and honor to others in the family. Sounds funny saying “honor” cause it sounds like a movie or saga of some sort, but I can’t really think of a better word for it cause that’s what was in question. Oddly some petty jealous relatives decided to undermine my past (of which they KNOW NOTHING OF) and tried to paint me as some sort of loser and psychopath or something to others in the hopes it would score kudos points with other members. Basically I have the kind of family that likes to talk shit about everyone else behind their backs to others, especially other family members to boost their own image in the eyes of who they are speaking to. Its that old shallow concept of if you trash someone else bad enough, regardless of how bad you are, the person you are talking about will always appear worse making even a murdering psycho look like a saint if you can wordsmith and connive well enough. Social Engineering at its best. To see it best in action, the movie Greedy has a perfect example. All the family members trashing one another in order to suck up to the old rich Patriarch in the hopes of being written into the inheritance and getting a larger slice than the others. This applies to mine own family as well, though instead of a rich Patriarch, they are trying to score points with my Grandmother, the well off Matriarch of the family (on my mother’s side).

My presence in the area where that part of my family resides for the time I lived there must have triggered a sense of concern amongst those greedy family members in thinking I moved back there to weasel my way into the Will. In reality that was something that never crossed my mind at all, I really just wanted to reconnect with my family having never known them. I never knew my father nor any of his family, so that’s all I had. When you get to be a certain age you start to take stock of your life and you look at things like where you come from, who your relatives are, etc and for me I had few answers and tons of questions. In the time I lived there though I felt more apart and an outsider than I did when I lived 3000+ miles away from the lot of them. 5 minutes away from virtually all of them in travel and seldom would I get a call to inform me of impromptu family functions or a get together and then had the displeasure of reading about it and seeing scores of crappy cell pics on Facebook afterwards (one of the many reasons I don’t use Facebook anymore). So finally I had enough and said “fuck it” and wrote almost all of them off. I realized I was happier when I was an outsider than when I tried to be part of something I was made to feel unwelcome in for so long.

So that leads me to chaotic plot device #2; my relocation. about a month and a half ago I moved a good number of states down from where I was to a new climate, culture and distanced myself from all that dramatic bullshit. Where I reside now is no secret, though I dont wish to clearly outline it here. While it isn’t covert or secret info, I have the underlying paranoia of this still being the Internet and full of weirdos that like to cross lines of whats appropriate in knowing about someone (see Trust and Respect I made a few years ago and you’ll see what I’m talking about). Well, anyone who’s moved before knows the hell that can be and how long it takes to settle in, so therein lies the problem of me posting. Between packing, unpacking, settling in, organizing, etc, etc, etc, I just haven’t had the time till now to get my ass to posting =)

Well now that I threw all that out there, and outlined my use of this Blog along with Google+ and Twitter, you wont be disappointed anymore when you don’t see a posting for a while. I don’t plan to go months again without one like recently, but still, hehe.

One of the main issues with LFG was that it tended to group people up with the undesirables of WoW most of the time as well has having flaws in how it assembled the groups. A lot of times as a healer or tank you would end up over-gearing the rest of the group causing you to bear the majority of stress on runs.  For example, as a healer with good gear it tended to lump you in with slightly under-geared tanks and DPS a lot of the time with what I can only guess as the concept of “if heals are good, the tank can take more damage and killing things can go slightly slower”. Well, that doesnt work. A mana bar can only take so much punishment before it runs dry and plus as healers we play for fun, not stress and strain and when each hit a tank is taking reduces them to half health or below, we cant stop to recover for any accidental foolishness DPS does and someone will die.

Aside from those little quirks though, the majority of the badness came from just player personality and just a complete lack of respect for others on the part of many other players. Now, I’ve been playing WoW since 2006, so I have the benefit of being able to see the rate of change in personality of the typical WoW player outside my guild in Pickup Groups (PUGs). Since I started playing WoW, the general helpfulness in dungeon groups has plummeted and the overall annoyance level as well as the total amount of assholes has skyrocketed. I used to PUG a lot and in the past a lot of my problems within them stemmed from what I mentioned above, lack of gearing, poor play style, people not understanding the encounters or their character, and basically just technical issues that sometimes could be overcome with explanation. Now however, its more personality and people being juvenile assholes than technical flaws. The average arrogance of the WoW player has just jumped by leaps and bounds over the last few years and its rather annoying and aggravating.

Now, anonymity and hostility go hand in hand and I know this from years on BBS’s and playing around in mIRC rooms, as well as other sources of chat and public interaction like forums. The Internet breeds assholes because people are more inclined to be jerks to one another when the consequence of knowing who they are in real life is removed. Basically most humans are chickenshits is what it comes down to. If these people had to give a real name and address to their nicknames online you wouldn’t see even half of the hostilities you do today. Penny Arcade did a great representation a few years ago describing this effect known as the “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” as shown below:

Again though, this I don’t believe is a good excuse for people to behave like assholes online, specifically within WoW, but sadly they still do. I’ve wrestled for a while on why this seems to be getting worse every year and I can’t say its entirely WoW and LFG/LFR tools to blame. I think it has a lot to do with society as a whole and how the newer generations are being raised by parents, or rather not being raised by parents in this case. While this is definitely a discussion of another type, I think the newer younger generations have less respect for everyone than older generations. They simply want things their way and now and are used to being catered to by lazy or weak parents and so it carries over online when they interact with others. I don’t doubt they even act similarly in person but probably are good at controlling it some depending on the size and intimidation factors associated with the person(s) they are targeting. Online, these aren’t factors at all so its basically 100% unchecked asshole behavior.

Anyhow, last Saturday night out of boredom I decided to run LFR, which would make it my second time total doing so, first time on my Druid. The first LFR experience was on my Warrior tank which actually wasn’t too unpleasant, people were nice save 1 or 2 people on that run. Saturday though I seem to have been the unfortunate winner of some asshole lottery and the run was filled to the brim with people from the realm Thunderlord who seemed to know one another well and all behaved exactly the same way, like assholes. Im not sure if they were in the same guild or not because to be honest, I didn’t and still don’t care as it has no impact on explaining why they behaved as they did but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were a group because people of that sort seem to flock to one another.

Now, we got through the first boss in Dragon Soul, Morchok, with some difficulty. For some reason every single healer ended up being a Resto Druid on that run. Unfortunately though myself and 1 other Resto Druid ended up carrying the weight of the healing as the other 3 just weren’t for some reason. Why? I have absolutely no clue, I looked briefly at my Skada meters to see what they were using as a primary effective heal and for one I saw [Wild Growth], and another I saw [Regrowth], which both are extremely ineffective and inefficient heals to be using at all as a chart topper. I don’t proclaim to be a WoW or Resto Druid expert, but I’ve been doing it long enough to know those 2 spells shouldn’t be at the top of the list of abilities being used and most effective heals for anyone.

Anyhow, fast forward to the second boss, which for this group was Warlord Zon’ozz and well, we wiped. It was pretty clear it was gonna happen because that is a highly intensive AOE healing fight and even in LFR which is scaled down a lot, 2 effective healers just wont be able to keep pace with the damage, and that’s exactly what happened. The 2 of us who were effective, just couldn’t heal everyone for what needed to be, and overall we both ended up carrying 24+% of the healing total on that attempt each, which would have been fine if the other 3 could do the same, but they didn’t and so we wiped. Apparently though that was the catalyst needed to infuse people from Thunderlord with the excuse they needed to be assholes to everyone, more specifically the healers. The first round of Vote Kicks ensued and the 3 bad healers were removed. Why they were bad, idk, maybe uneducated, under-geared, I can’t say and sadly LFR just as in LFG doesn’t always offer up the opportunity to talk with them and find out, especially when you have assholes in the group. Unfortunately for those 3, the very assholes in question were running the raid, all of them had either Raid Leader or Assist .

Following those 3 being kicked, the other Druid who was on par with me left on their own, probably because of the verbal attacks that started against “healers” in general and how much “we suck”, etc etc. Below is a transcript of the chat log if you care to peruse, I finally got tired of listening to them and threw the 2 main problem children on ignore (Hamerofdoom-Thunderlord and Gelhan-Thunderlord). My chat log however still recorded their juvenile behavior even though in game I no longer could see any of it.

I have to note on this log there are references to meters. I don’t like meters but they are a good way to see when there is a problem what it might be. Unfortunately some people look solely at numbers and on our second try, the pally at the #1 spot had so much over healing it was disgusting. But, its big numbers and to some people its like penis envy, the bigger the better regardless how much of that total might be a waste.

——————————-
Click to expand the LFR Nightmare Chatlog

Now I know this isn’t an example of every LFR, but it is an example of a common issue within LFR and LFG. This is the reason why I disliked how Blizzard basically makes people dependent upon this new system to get offset pieces for normal raiding. There are many of us who don’t want to put up with this kind of treatment or situation when we play WoW which is why using Justice points and the like to buy pieces of gear we couldn’t get fortunate for drops on raids was a great alternative. Now I can either hope my luck on raids holds out and I get the tier tokens I need and want or I can alternatively put up with this bullshit every week. Forgive me if I cling to hope instead because no one should have to put up with this kind of harassment just for a chance at some offset pieces of gear.

For the WoW players out there, stick up for people who get targeted like this. So many people in that 25 raid who weren’t part of that little clique remained silent, with only 1 of them jumping in to put the assholes in their places. 1 other person showed support in tells and that’s it, which leads me to believe that there were likely more who felt bad at how I was being targeted and treated in the raid but none said anything or did anything. Someone tried a vote kick on one of them which failed because some people placed DPS numbers above civility and I was told that there was an attempt to vote kick me 2 times which failed both times so they showed support there, but c’mon. There was enough people in that raid to kick those 2 assholes easily and yet no one did it.

I can hold my own and defend myself when need be, but seriously folks, this is why the state of social interaction in WoW has deteriorated so much. Everyone would just rather ignore everyone else and get through things for loot than stand up for whats right. Sadly its a good example of whats wrong with society in the world today as well. Head down, mouth shut, who gives a damn the guy I just passed was being mugged at knife point.

Notice the red areas. I highlighted the words to show how they lie.

So now I highlight the red areas for you purposely because notice how it states clearly I have 4 days to remedy the situation before I am suspended. 4 days from the 6th would be the 10th correct? Wrong, its the 7th according to Google and heres why…

Last night in a rage of annoyance from this I posted on my G+ wall for friends to see so they would be aware of what was going on. Some friends only know me on G+, they don’t visit here or my twitter because they were people I met on G+ on various threads and posts from celebrities and whatnot such as Wil Wheaton. At any rate, this is a copy word for word what I posted last night:

I know I’ve already posted on this but I am still steamed about it. So I am going to make everyone aware of some things before I am turned off should the appeal process on names for Google+ not work. There is an annoying popup every time I log in now saying my name is fake and so heres my rant…

I am Cherokee, and a little known fact is that we do not use the same names as everyone else. Running Bear, Moon Brook, Shadow Wolf, all names that are NORMAL in Native American tradition where we are named after stories, lore, nature, and so on. It seems however that Google would rather label me as a phoney because of this instead of accepting that names are not always “standard” like Jim Brown, or Tim Smith. Those are EUROPEAN names, those people who came over many moons ago to the Americas and basically all but wiped my ancestors off the globe and shoved what remained into internment camps known as reservations.

Now, I am not bitter nor prejudice against other races or ethnicity. One can not be held accountable for what one’s ancestors did. Condemning someone for such things would be insanity as they didn’t even exist when those events took place so they would have had no way to influence them one way or another.

At any rate, I am extremely upset and annoyed with this latest turn of events. I have stuck by Google through many things and when G+ came about I was overjoyed to finally be able to use a social service that wasn’t a treasure trove of privacy violations and identity theft loopholes like Facebook. Unfortunately this little gem delivered to me today has made me seriously reconsider my position on Google.

I am told by the automated system here that if my appeal is not approved or I do not change my name by the 10th of January, that my account will be suspended. Of all things on the appeal process to “verify” myself, I was asked for a Facebook profile link or a LinkedIN profile link which was just ridiculous. In addition I was offered to provide a Photo ID of myself to prove my identity.

Dear Google;
I am not providing you with a Photo ID of myself. You are not a legal binding document, nor a government entity, nor am I purchasing anything through you. To have the audacity to ask me for such a thing simply because I violate your standard naming system which is based on a bias standard to begin with is offensive and puts you in league no better than the likes of Facebook and its countless violations of personal privacy. I am not pretending to be a celebrity or someone I am not, I am not hosting a group page on this profile, I am me. The same person under this name that my tribe knows me by, my friends and my family. When people search for me, this is the name they use. To have to “prove” anything to you is downright offensive. I have done nothing wrong except exist apparently and for that I am being harassed and annoyed.

To my friends;

If after Jan 10th you no longer see me as part of your circles or posting, you’ll know why. Quite honestly I am reconsidering even staying on here even if the appeals process uncovers that I *gasp* really am me. A company that is going to go through this much trouble and annoyance over something this trivial just puts me in a bad mood and makes me question my faith in it. I have a Photo ID which will resolve this easily, but I am not going to use it because I shouldn’t have to.

The day we have to prove who we are online is a sad day indeed.

Shadowwolf

So clearly my account was working early this morning and then mysteriously sometime after my post was made trashing Google+ and its stupid naming system policies, my account was not working. Coincidence? Highly unlikely.

More Words of Rant…

Now in the illustrious words of Dennis Miller, I don’t want to go off on a rant here but…

This is bullshit. Plain and simple. The fact that Google is trying to police the internet and yes, their service in making people use real names is just dumb and I feel a violation of rights. There are many reasons people can’t use real names online, and mainly those are for political reasons. If someone in China was exposing government lies and whatnot, using their real name would be a sure ticket they were arrested and never heard from again. Same goes for any country, not just China. Sometimes using a pen name or some sort of code name is imperative to make sure your safety isnt put at risk.

For me, this is my name. My REAL name. This is what I was named by my parents when I was born. Do I have another name in which I use for business purposes and whatnot? Yes, I do. Why? Because for the same reason I am being targeted by Google+, people do not react well to Native American traditional names. Sometimes they scoff at them or form prejudices against you because of it. My legal name is Shadow Wolf. Period. It’s on all my legal documents, when I file taxes, thats whats on it. What I do is not illegal, and for Google+ to treat me this way is appalling to say the least.

US Law states:

A person may be employed, do business, enter into contracts, sue and be sued under any name they choose at will. Such a change carries exactly the same legal weight as a court-decreed name change, as long as it is not done with fraudulent intent.

In nearly all states, a person cannot choose a name that is intended to mislead (such as adopting a celebrity’s name), that is intentionally confusing, or that incites violence; nor can one adopt, as a name, a racial slur, a threat, or an obscenity.

So basically Google is trying to enforce its own set of rules that go against legal laws of the country or possibly countries in which they do business. Online, these laws don’t apply with exception of course such as if you are purchasing something, but apparently Google seems fit to enforce its own set of laws for G+ regardless. All because my name is “weird” and “odd” in comparison to John Smith, or “Jim Brown”. I have to wonder though if any John Smith’s on Google+ are being asked to prove who they are also since that’s a common “fake” name as well.

What annoys me more than anything though is the double standard in play. You have celebrities who use made up nicknames and crap like “The Situation” or “Snooki” and they don’t get harassed, but because my name doesn’t conform to normal standards, I am harassed and when I speak out about it, I am shut down.

For a company that claims to be so against Protect-IP and SOPA, they sure are doing a good job enforcing the yet to be decided on bills.

*UPDATE* – Jan 18, 2012
Enclosed is some screenshots of some conversations I had on G+ profiles. You’ll notice I remain professional and don’t violate any policies in my posts however most topics are pretty opinionated and heated. I can only surmise someone wanted to silence me or get even for my intellectual words by using Google against me.

Recently the House of Representatives released a list of supporters which are intertwined in this horrid legislation. On the list was GoDaddy, which to me is not that surprising. With the last year of Homeland Security website shut downs, GoDaddy was the registrar where all the seized domains were returned to for resale. Why wouldn’t they support this? They know they stand to gain if this passes with free domains. Well the internet rose up as one voice and organized by Reddit, a mass boycott of GoDaddy took place with huge internet names like Wikipedia moving services to other companies.

Seeming to take a cue from the PR disaster Netflix landed in, GoDaddy CEO stated in interviews that he neither supports or is against SOPA and ProtectIP. Way to fail at appealing to both sides of the debate and even with his stated indecision, a mass exodus of customers took place. Within 2 days the company lost 35,000 domains, this is only those that are publicly traceable (the ones GoDaddy hosts DNS for). While this number seems low if you consider how many domains they do provide for, it still translates to roughly $500k a year in revenue lost in just 2 days time. That also doesn’t include any other services they lost like SSL or self DNS hosted domains of which I’m sure only those within the company know the exacts on.

This mass exodus spooked the company so much they actually took steps to slow the exit of customers to other competitors by intentionally causing issues in the transfer process.

As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them.

Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules.

http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/

Once again, making a bad situation worse as the net took that as a sign of guilt admittance and the exodus continued. Now this is an important and what I believe to be largely ignored effort on the part of the average people. It’s in my opinion a historical moment where the net took a stand against a company by voicing with their wallets and while or pockets may not be as deep as those in support of these bills, together we can show enough of an impact on businesses where they are forced to listen if they want to keep taking our money. Sadly we shouldn’t have to resort to this since our politicians should be doing what we as a people want and what’s best for us and not for what’s in the interest of businesses, but alas, those days dotted a long time ago and all our politicians were bought and paid for long before they were elected.

GoDaddy and a Censorship History…

Now personally, I hate GoDaddy. I just don’t like the sexist marketing campaign where they have sexual innuendos in their commercials for a company that is basically just a Registrar. That reason pales in comparison to my others though, which is their business practices. GoDaddy likes to consider itself the Internet Police when it comes to domains they manage and sites they host. They are quick to censor things and favor the big business customers over the small guy or gal with a website. The best example can be seen here:

http://news.cnet.com/GoDaddy-pulls-security-site-after-MySpace-complaints/2100-1025_3-6153607.html

Basically the sum of that is MySpace called GoDaddy to complain that a website that dealt with security and exploits, for layman purposes a hacker website but a completely legitimate one, was hosting lists of usernames and passwords on an archived mailing list posting of MySpace users. MySpace called GoDaddy to complain, not the site owners, and requested it be taken down, and GoDaddy complied, again, without speaking to the site owners first.

While the content of a mailing list is difficult neigh impossible to regulate most times, this is the sort of thing that GoDaddy is known for doing. They have done similar things over the years and without proper cause or legal rationale and so it comes as no surprise they helped to create SOPA.

Now recent headlines state that big name companies in the video game industry are withdrawing support for the bill and this is not entirely true. The individual companies themselves are yes but only in a spin of words and PR campaign in an effort to avoid a Go Daddy like scenario. Nintendo, Sony, and Electronic Arts have withdrawn support from the bill publicly, but they belong to the Entertainment Software Association, a unified group of game development companies which still supports the legislation. So yes, they withdrew themselves to satisfy the less informed customers, but they now quietly support it through that other entity. Think of it like a Swiss bank account, they can funnel money to support the bills through that organization and still maintain a “clean” image to their customers. Unfortunately not many tech writers theses days seem to be paying attention to that little loophole and are doing exactly what theses companies are hoping, spreading word that they withdrew support to quell any customer uprising that could impact sales. I could say i was disappointed in how the media is not being accurate in it’s reporting, but I lost faith in news media a long long time ago so it comes as no surprise sadly.

Now the internet is mainly abuzz with SOPA but ProtectIP is it’s brother making it’s way through Congress and is just as bad but hasn’t earned as much attention. Again, I blame the media and it’s lack of reputable journalism for not making it as known as SOPA. Granted ProtectIP isn’t as bad, but it is still bad for the internet in the long term.

Now for those of you who still don’t understand why these are bad pieces of legislation, I’ll try and break it down some simply. Basically these two bills want to change the freedoms we all take for granted on the internet. Things like posting YouTube videos on your Facebook or G+ pages, linking to websites in emails, Web pages and public forums, even so much as quoting articles or movies would all come under censorship. Service providers would be held responsible for content deemed infringement and could be shut down without any warning or court order.

What is so dangerous about the wording of theses bills is they are very very generalized and vague in what can be considered “infringing content”. Plus, the methods proposed in shutting these accused sites give way to freedom of speech issues. Essentially the U.S. wants to make the internet work like it does in China and other oppressive countries where they control what you see and do and filter out accused sites. See where the problem comes into play now? You pool that in with the complete lack of any oversight on the entities which would be responsible for enforcement of this and it paints a very grim future of the internet. Orson Welles 1984 anyone? Think about it, what would stop sites which offered information or news on political issues or corporate scandals from being shut down for “copyright infringement”? Do you really want top entrust the government to be honest and accurate with it’s removal of sites and filtering of content. The Homeland Security office has already shown how inept it is with handling the shutdowns of sites in the last year and a vast majority of them being unfounded and incorrect. Thankfully there is a legal recourse right now to combat those false shutdowns and with these bills, that recourse would go away. We don’t need to be taking lessons from China and other oppressive regimes on how to police the internet.

Take a look at Belarus, the land of soviet era oppression and dictatorship. they recently passed a law that fines and can even imprison anyone caught browsing sites outside the country. If places such as Internet Cafe’s don’t report such behavior, they too can be found guilty and the same punishments levied.

The Law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages. It appears that business requests from Belarus cannot be served over the Internet if the service provider is using online services located outside of the country. The tax authorities, together with the police and secret police, are authorized to initiate, investigate, and prosecute such violations.

Additionally, the Law states that the owners and administrators of Internet cafés or other places that offer access to the Internet might be found guilty of violating this Law and fined and their businesses might be closed if users of Internet services provided by these places are found visiting websites located outside of Belarus and if such behavior of the clients was not properly identified, recorded, and reported to the authorities. The Law states that this provision may apply to private individuals if they allow other persons to use their home computers for browsing the Internet.

http://www.loc.gov/lawweb/servlet/lloc_news?disp3_l205402929_text

Sounds insane right? Well SOPA and ProtectIP aren’t all that far off from such a thing. It’s a step in a bad direction headed down the road of oppression and the concept, design and spirit of the Internet is all about freedom of information. It also opens the door to abuse and infringing on freedoms we in this country cherish so much. While we don’t have to pirate movies, music and whatnot, using an iron rule to try and curb those things isn’t going to solve the issue either.

In the end this comes down to the entertainment industry once again trying to kill off a threat to how it makes money in any way it can. Instead of taking time and effort to try and grow with technology and adapt how they make money to how technology moves and the internet moves ahead, they would rather stifle it. The same thing was done with VCR’s, DVD’s, Cassette Tapes, etc. Its easier for them to sit back and watch the money roll in than it is to innovate and keep pace with the changing times.

Think about how a censored internet would look and be like. Wikipedia with incomplete articles because parts were deemed to infringe upon copyrights, making a funny YouTube video for your friends without any background music because its copyrighted, or Facebook and Google+ profiles where you couldn’t even express your like/dislike of things because it might be forcefully removed if the post its about is considered copyrighted info. Now think of the potential for abuse that could and highly likely would take place with no legal oversight in the removal of those sites and content. A blog writes a review of a movie it thinks is bad and the movie company forces the posts removal because the mention of the title is considered “infringing”. A site that points out information on a government bill that jeopardizes citizen liberty in some way suddenly is taken down or blocked access to because it “infringes copyrights”. If you think these things are far fetched they aren’t.

Now don’t misunderstand me here, I believe that copyrights should be upheld and defended as if you make something you should have the right to call it your own. I am also NOT advocating we all have the right to pilfer and pirate movies, games, software or whatever at free will. The thing is though, no matter what steps are taken, this will always take place. When you make something good and it costs money to obtain, there will always be a group of people who refuse to pay and try to find ways to obtain it for free. It’s called theft and theft is a part of society unfortunately, such is life. The problem here is that the proposed “solution” doesn’t fix the problem in any way, it simply punishes the rest of the people by censoring what they can see and have access too. That’s not how you fix a problem, that’s how you ruin a society and create a bigger problem or make a problem worse than it is, which is what I think would happen if this went into effect.

Something to remember here that I think is important:

“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. …. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.”

That quote comes from a TV show dialogue. With SOPA, I’d be forced to take that down…

In the end, this is what happens when people in power are allowed to make decisions about things they know nothing about. While this wouldn’t be so bad if they listened to the experts who do know, they aren’t. In every testimony from an expert stating this is a bad idea, congressmen and representatives in support of this bill simply dismissed the facts given and in some cases outright ignored them or lied that they never got any response.

“I am pleased that the unfounded claims of critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act have overwhelmingly been rejected by a majority of House Judiciary Committee members. The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality. Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts.”

- Lamar Smith (R-Texas)

If these bills do end up passing, you might want to know how much your freedom costs: $57.4 million, less than the cost of what one decent movie takes in from ticket sales on a summer weekend.

http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-hr-3261/1019110/total-contributions

* Note: I wrote this on my tablet on the train yesterday, so please forgive any typos

Mainly though, I apologize to everyone who may have been looking forward to more festive expressions on the TW Guild site. I know in years past I’ve changed the logo around for the holiday, added new colors or something, plus did some other stuff like last years Grinch in the upper right corner of the forum, but things have been so chaotic for me these last few months, its hard to find the desire to create those things especially having gone through a lot with the logo redesign.

Basically all I did this year was nothing for Thanksgiving (boo on me), some snowfall on the forum for Xmas, and hard to see confetti in the forum background for new years. I know, definitely a lack of impact on all those but again, its hard to create when you are in the process of home transitioning.

Yes, for those of you unaware, I sold my house and am in the process of relocating, and so temporarily till the new house is done, I am staying with relatives in of all places a basement. Talk about filling some stereotypes, I play WoW and live in a basement. Now I just need to nerdrage on people in game and it’ll be complete. Well, anyhow, its due to that lack of permanence in my living situation at the moment as well as a lack of space that kind of ruins my mood to be creative and do funny and inspirational things. Soon though, looking to be moving into the new house in a short few weeks here finally, but for the meantime I am sorry for not expressing the holidays as I usually do on the site.

I will make it up to everyone once I finish the re-design though =)

Let’s look at what Cataclysm brought as far as notable changes to WoW first. Things I list in Green I consider a positive, things in Red a negative to make it simple. Again, mileage may vary and you might disagree but this isn’t your blog so if you feel strongly enough about it, start your own blog and talk about it .

Worgen and Goblin existed in the WoWverse (WoW Universe) for some time. In fact since vanilla both have been a staple in the game. The main difference in most cases is Worgen were usually depicted as slobbering bloodthirsty unintelligent beasts with humanoid characteristics. There were some tales of Gilneans near Shadowfang Keep in the townsfolk below the castle, where by day game play hours they were friendly human NPCs and in the evening they were Worgen who would aggro like any normal hostile entity in the game. Goblins on the other hand were everywhere running most of the neutral cities scattered throughout the continents and even beyond (Outlands). Now, I may be a bit boas due to my L-O-V-E for the Worgen race, but still, I’ll try to be as impartial as I can. Overall I liked this decision with the new races, we needed a few more to play since the last 2 races were added back in BC and it gave more variety to play. I will say honestly though that the Worgen model design, particularly females was not as good as it could have been. The males look great, the females look…awkward. Figure-wise they are fine, facial expression though is poor. Why do I need to walk around with my teeth bared constantly in a mouth that looks as though I couldn’t completely close it if I wanted to. Plus the lack of customization is a downer, my hairstyles are limited and so similar there’s hardly a point to choosing one as well as the lack of a tail…wtf, even Wolvar have tails!

This one is basically a draw because it was a good idea done badly. I think the good and bad are split pretty evenly down the middle so it cant be completely considered a failure or a positive. The talent system before was a mess, but it was a customizable mess in the sense of your character could be your own. How you spent points was yours and while it might not have been “ideal” in the raid sense of WoW, it was still workable in many respects and added to the sense of personalization in your character. This was great, but the talent system had a TON of bloat. When I say bloat, I mean sooo many points that just did stupid stuff or were just underpowered for what they needed to be and points that you had to waste to get to things that were good. The bad part of the revamp in Cataclysm was the sense of being too linear. You no longer had ways to customize your character and were basically pinned into a set spec till you almost maxed out the talents in that tree and then got like a handful to do with what you wanted. Unfortunately because of the changes to all the talents, even that handful you got toward the end had to be spent in specific spots depending on your spec or it was noticeable in all areas of game play. The system as it is in Cata now felt more lined up with entry level WoW players who may have felt daunted in spending talent points and kind of attempted to simplify it TOO much so that it became annoying to more veteran players or even new players who had spent time with WoW for a bit to be annoyed by it. The giving of certain abilities right away upon choosing a tree though was excellent in you no longer had to wait till around level 40 to finally feel like a Resto Druid or Enhancement Shaman.

Honestly the homogenization of classes that was done all around this expansion I think plays a large role in why people have been dropping off WoW in subscriptions. People want to be able to customize their character to themselves. When you remove that ability from the game or at least make it harder to do where there really isn’t much of a difference between one hunter and the next, or one druid and the next, there’s little appeal to play that character anymore. We play this game for fantasy and an alternate reality, regardless what the end goal of enjoyment might be. If we have to be like everyone else that’s more like the real world and the real world isn’t fun for most of us, its a grind.

I’ve bitched about this ever since Cata was released and I intend to keep on bitching because it was just a really awful way to counter inflated character stats in combat situations. For starters, health from WotLK to Cataclysm on average increased by 5 to 10 times where a typical geared tank would walk around in 40k health in Wrath, now in entry level Cata would be around 120k or so health. On the flip side of that healing from 80-85 only increased in potency of spells by about double. So basically a Rejuvenation tick would land for about 1.2k and now in Cata lands for about 3k a tick with the potential to crit yes, but still, hardly a comparable increase to the increase in health pools and boss/raid damage. Mana regen was another thing to be hit with this redesign and it was also poorly thought through. In addition to a lower amount of regen and stats that affected it being changed, there was a “homogenization” of all heal classes to include Druids to a more single target long cast approach where basically almost all heal classes were forced into re-learning how to play in Cataclysm. So 5yrs prior to playing my druid in a healing capacity, I now had to learn from scratch again due to the mana cost increases on what Blizzard decided was “lazy” spells that provided quick heals. In addition, while these spells were quick and cost a ton of mana, they didn’t really heal for that much either. Honestly I could go on and on about this and I know this is a particular topic of debate on the WoW forums as well but I consider this part of Cataclysm the largest failure of the expansion because basically it was too much all at once. I understand an expansion was needed to do it all as patches couldn’t work through such a redesign, but this was a poor way in making healing “more challenging” as they claimed people wanted. Honestly I felt healing most WotLK fights was challenging enough especially in Heroics but then again I don’t consider myself a hardcore raider so perhaps that’s who they were listening to when they came up with the plan and the complaints about it being too easy. All in all taking away most of the uniqueness of the healing classes in how they heal save a few differentiating spells was just a terrible idea and it made for more frustration on a lot of healers. I get the idea of wanting to prevent advantages of one type over another in regard to raid attendance and invites, but it was poorly thought through.

Before you start rolling your eyes or think this is merely QQ, it isn’t and let me explain. The Raid Difficulty amplification in Cata, or what I like to call the “Interrupt or Die Raid Design” is something that hasn’t made its appearance since Sunwell. I will start off clarifying a few things who don’t know me or <Twilight> well enough to understand where my view on this comes from. To explain some, what we define as a casual guild that we consider ourselves is probably different than what most would consider casual. I don’t factor in the total raiding time each week into the term “casual” at all. What defines how we look at that term is how we raid in that we never discriminate per class, only role. So if the proper number of healers, tanks and DPS sign up, regardless of spec and role provided they can do those roles properly and adequately for that raid, we take. This differs greatly from most guilds casual or hardcore in that they typically try and “stack” the raid for classes and it helps them overcome fights. Certain classes do bring advantages over other classes or just not having them puts some disadvantage on the raid which is why a lot of hardcore guilds raid 25. You simply get a better class mix on 25 than you can achieve on 10. In addition to that aspect, we don’t take the same people week after week. We rotate participation, so who was present for a learning wipe-a-thon on a boss one week may not be present the following week and someone who hasn’t been to that fight will be along instead. This means the learning curve for our raids takes a bit longer, especially on complex fights because we need to spread the experience around till we get it down. So in addition to trial and error, we are also schooling new players to the fight almost every week for some time on new bosses.

Now that I clarified what we considered “casual raiding”. this Cata change kind of goes along with the healing change as the 2 of these changes together were just disastrous at the start if the expansion. One or the other alone may have been fine, but paired this caused a good deal of frustrations and people becoming fed up with raiding early on in the expansion. As a guild leader I saw this first hand in the drop off of signup participation of raids. We had no trouble at all filling a 25 raid in the new raid instances for the first few weeks, Baradin Hold to start then attempts at BWD and BoT thereafter, and within only a month or 2 we could scarcely get 12 people on which forced us to drop to a 10 schedule. This was due to the whole tight tuning mentality of the fights where 1 mistake by any one person almost surely resulted in a failure. Healers felt overstressed and taxed, DPS felt pressured to keep numbers high with tight enrage timers all while trying to avoid everything plus the kitchen sink in most fights. We went from a few mistakes allowed here and there with possibility for recovery if acted on quickly to not even 1 mistake even with quick thinking attempts at recovery and being a casual nature guild where spec, class and play time isn’t a requirement on anything we do, it hurt us severely. Most of the entry level raids in Cataclysm felt over-tuned and not at all entry level like the WotLK raids did. It felt as though as soon as you jumped in the kitchen sink got thrown at you and you had to survive the chaos with one arm behind your back and a blindfold attached. Which also leads me to mention the 1 combat rez per boss fight attempt. Again, overkill with the other changes. How many people were really exploiting this in boss fights honestly? I never read anywhere prior to Cata of some world first or even server first bringing a ton of druids to do a Rebirth Rotation or anything like that. Meanwhile it further adds to the unrecoverable mistake situation of raid fights. Having multiple combat rezzes available makes learning the fights easier since mistakes aren’t the death knell of the raid that try. It also relieves some pressure on the raiders in that they don’t feel as if they screw up slightly, have excessive lag or a disconnect they will screw over everyone else in the raid.

The whole afterthought of massive nerfs to each prior tiered content was also a bust. Complaining to the developers about the lack of friendliness to casual players the raids had on inception resulted in a response of “oh you can just do it once we nerf it then” which is kind of like a parent telling the youngest child “You can have your older siblings clothes once they are done with them cause we don’t want to spend money buying you your own clothes”. No one wants sloppy seconds, and raiding was something even doing it as uniquely as we do, we were successful at it in Burning Crusade which is when most would consider raids “hard” compared to WotLK. It felt like the majority of the raiding content was aimed at the hardcore 10% raider instead of the 2-3 day 1-2hr a night player like it was and when people would complain about it to Blizzard they would be skinned and eaten alive on the WoW forums by not just the forum trolls but at times some of the Blue posters as well adding to that feeling of isolation and frustration which inevitably caused a lot of players some of whom were longtime WoW gamers to quit and move on to other games.

What happened to the BC and Wrath concept of “newer gear will evenly and casually nerf prior tier content”? Back in the last 2 expansions there was no need for the huge -20% across the board content nerf on raids because the next tier of gear would automatically make the previous content easier. Who thought this was a good idea to just swing the nerf bat wildly and randomly pick things to nerf? Yes I said randomly because we have a -20% across on all T11 content on NORMAL only, heroics left as-is, then Firelands gets a -20 to -25% nerf to both normal and heroic. Consistency anyone? If these encounters were properly tested and tuned accordingly these nerfs wouldn’t be necessary and if gear was itemized and scaled properly, the same as past nerfing philosophy would hold true. Right now gear between tiers is sadly minor stat increases, nothing significant. The leap from heroic items in BC to T4 was HUGE making it a basic no brainer in upgrading, now the stats are so close together we see a minor increase in upgrades, only the item level jumps a lot.

Now, I am all for difficulty, and I like a challenge, but the “interrupt this spell or wipe” concept of raiding is too frustrating to be enjoyable on any level. In addition, making fights where sooo much is being thrown at you at once and randomly (Elemental Council in BoT, Contructs in BWD, even to a certain extent Ragnaros in Firelands) doesn’t make it more challenging and “fun” it just makes it frustrating and annoying and so less people will do it. As evident by the needed nerfs to Firelands long before the next tier of content was to be released in 4.3.

Let me explain this one some. What I mean by this is that Cataclysm felt very linear, from the questing, leveling, new zones, talents, etc. Everyone basically has to follow the exact same path to get something done and you aren’t allowed or able to deviate from that path at all. In addition, it felt very “this is how we think you should play our game” from Blizzard which oozed through in patches, changes and more so in WoW forum postings so much so that it seems Ghostcrawler needed to get a PR agent to filter his developer posts. You could literally hear the arrogance in his words within the first few months of Cataclysm on all his postings which just infuriated already upset and frustrated players. The whole concept of having to do one set of quests to unlock others was just aggravating. For instance, to unlock the daily quests for Therazane, you had to basically do every quest in Deepholm and that’s just obnoxious to have someone do 110 quests to get to an important rep. Going back to re-do all the older zones to work in the same way, again, obnoxious. I liked leveling where I could grab a bunch of quests and just go grind them all out and turn them all in at once. I liked the option of skipping the quests I didn’t like as much and just doing the ones I did, case in point, Stranglethorn Vale. I hated that zone before the Cataclysm changes, and so I would kinda cherry pick what quests I would do there to swing by in levels and move on to the next zone. There really isn’t any way to do that in any zone anymore. I can see the value in doing things that way for new players, it keeps things from getting too confusing and overwhelming but at the same token, it dumbs down the Loremaster achievement considerably which kind of annoys me considering I worked for that one before the changes.

The whole “you will play this way” concept just doesn’t work. The best example I can give on how telling consumers how they can use and enjoy your product and how it doesn’t work is most recently Apple and the whole iPhone 4 antenna debacle. “It has signal issues because you aren’t holding it properly.”…yea…didn’t go over very well for them and they had to cave to complaints and give free cases away. Unfortunately for Blizzard a few free cases aren’t going to bring those subscribers back.

In addition, Cataclysm class redesign felt an awful lot like Guitar Hero where you had to push the right combo of buttons in the right order at the right speed and if you did that, you win. DPS classes had rotations in the past so this was nothing new, but Cata seemed to give a rotational sense to healers and tanks as well which is just…dumb. Doing that takes away a dynamic aspect of the game in raids and groups where now skill falls more on your latency and ability to click faster instead of knowing your class well. I felt like what was awful of arenas in quick fights, deaths because you or your arena partner(s) missed a Global Cooldown and so on were put into PvE game play and it sucks to be perfectly honest. I stopped PvP because I hated that and here I feel like I have to endure it in PvE now.

For me, Raiding isn’t the overall goal of WoW. I enjoy doing other things like questing, non-grindy feeling dailys, special events and holidays, heroic dungeons, achievements sometimes (another rant for another day though), and just everything you can do in the game. Unfortunately, I have sort of watched the content delivery in WoW trickle out of an eye dropper compared to Burning Crusade. Now, granted, I wasn’t around for Vanilla release and my understanding is for some time, Molten Core was it and it was a grind from hell till BWL and ZG came out some time later followed by AQ and Naxx v1 so I guess the start of WoW has been that way. In BC though there was a TON of content to run at 70. You had Kara to kick start your raiding off and it was difficult but if you ran your heroics before you could gear up enough to make it easier, then came Gruul and Magtheridon, then came SSC and TK: Eye, after that was Hyjal and BT, and right before WotLK came Sunwell which seemed to be an appeasement for the bitchy hardcore raiders who cried about being bored with BT. All of this was in the game by the first 6mos of release of BC and while some didn’t work properly (hello Lady Vashj repop on kill) and other stuff it got fixed fairly quickly. The zones in BC were HUGE and Sunwell even added a whole new zone (small) but full of new dailys. WotLK came along, same deal, good amount of raids right away, some small tho Naxx was pretty large and it offered entry level raiding. Ulduar came not too long after, and was an awesome raid. The content, bosses, layout, detail on the inside, everything was fantastic. Again, zones were huge too and by the time I hit lvl 80, I still had all of Icecrown and even other zones I still hadn’t touched in leveling to explore more lore in and do content.

Here comes Cataclysm and we were told only a few new zones because WORLDBREAKER DEATHWING! and that content in the “old” zones would be redone and provide things to do. Nope. Definitely things to re-explore and all, but the content revamp actually made a lot of the older zones feel smaller and some even insignificant. As for 80-85 zones, again, small and lacking. Instances were lacking, only a handful and while short which is nice, the restructure of healing and class balances made doing them lengthy with a crap load of trash pulls between each boss. Vashj’ir in concept was kinda cool, but it was probably the largest and convoluted zone of all the new zones. A pain in the ass to navigate through, even with the special [Subdued Abyssal Seahorse] and just felt annoying. As far as raiding went, we had 3 instances to do, all supposedly equally balanced which they were definitely not. This made it hard to get things done for casual guilds like us where we would down maybe 1 or 2 bosses in BWD, then hit a block of DPS lacking, healers under-geared or just a learning curve on the fight. Jumping into Bastion which the first fight is LOLRANDOM each week making it difficult to be a constant kill when the damn fight changes week to week meaning its hard to teach and learn the fight when you think you get it and “Oh, hey, that isn’t happening this week, this is now… /dead” which okay, I get the concept, but for a first fight of an instance…extremely stupid. Especially when there was no “entry level” raid in Cataclysm. Here we are having to rock blues again from heroics (which is fine, that I liked, epics should be earned) and I’m getting my ass handed to me as soon as I walk in because its over-tuned for hardcore 10%ers.

Next patch we get Firelands which feels like recycled Molten Core right down to the ungodly rep grind and umpteen trash pulls within it which then gets nerfed hardcore come only a few months after its release because it was over-tuned as well. Lets also not forget the recycled troll raids into heroics either which makes me very sad because I liked ZG and ZA as they were as raids. Raising them to 85 level and keeping them as raids, yea, would have sucked too, but I think would have been a bit better as it would have given more raiding options as opposed to the Firelands grind. The content just feels lacking this expansion where originality seems to be frowned upon or something in development and when originality does creep in its so “revolutionary” and “new” it tends to be bugged to sin and not work right (*cough* Atramedes *cough* Lord Rhyolith).

Story lines in Cata were also more prone to being left unfinished. We do a whole zone of Naga and leading up to what looks like something involving both another old god like C’Thun or Yogg-Saron and Lady Azshara herself finally and the storyline just ends abruptly with Neptulon being hauled off at the end of Throne of the Tides. The same can be said for a lot of things added to lore like Gilneas, a sense of to be continued permeates through the starter zone ending quests and yet…nothing, not even a crumb.

Then we move on to the artificial ceilings and how blatantly obvious they have become. Gear and upgrade points are doled out through what seems to be the same eye dropper as content is delivered. To artificially extend the content, and yes, its clear that’s the reason Blizz, secret is out, there is a cap on how many points you can earn each week. This cap is incredibly ill thought as while it might extend content and keep a leash on those guilds who would race through content, it disadvantages those people who can’t max points each week. If those folks end up falling behind their friends due to real life situations preventing play, they have a hard time catching up again. In addition to that, there is a severe discrepancy in how many points players get awarded for different things. T11 heroic content, the stuff that is still hardcore and hasn’t been touched by nerfs still yields garbage for points upon completion compared to T12 normal content. In many respects, a lot of the heroic T11 fights are a lot harder than the regular T12 stuff, especially considering T12 was already nerfed.

When you put these kinds of stupid limiters on things like guild rep each week, points earned each week, etc, it makes the game incredibly grindy. Yes limiting it makes content last longer, but most of the casual folks aren’t going to finish said content, get bored and eventually quit playing because in the end we all play this game to have fun, not feel like a second job or that no matter how hard we try we will still hit some sort of invisible wall that slows us down from reaching our goals.

Finally, some of the promises of more Guild involvement in Cataclysm…yea, didn’t happen. In fact, the guild reputation and leveling system actually created more of a sense of individual competition than a sense of overall camaraderie because a lot of the guild “achievements” were based on individual effort and not so much on the guild as a whole. The reputation system caused a severe issue in recruitment, people didn’t want to give up the grind they worked for to join an unknown guild even if they were unhappy. The guild instances and raid weekly accomplishments were a start but I think I saw that somewhere else first…where was that again…oh yes, in Rift along with other guild related group efforts that still aren’t in WoW. What about guild quests, guild group dailys and so on? Most guilds already raid and instance together so this isn’t giving us anything different or new to improve or bring guilds closer together and give a sense of deeper involvement.

So to sum up here, when it comes to Cataclysm as an expansion, I can honestly say without question “I AM DISAPPOINT!“. Having played WoW for as long as I have, this expansion was a very big let down and felt half-assed and rushed throughout. Even now sitting on the cusp of 4.3′s release, it feels almost too soon. Kind of like “Deathwing already?” It felt like getting to Illidan and The Lich King took a lot longer and more earned along the way and this just feels cheap and rushed which if I could use 2 words to sum up Cataclysm, those would be the 2 I would pick, “Cheap” and “Rushed”. The quality compared to prior expansions was just sub-par, and I know it takes a lot to create and maintain a game like WoW, but when you raise the bar of quality and standards to what BC and WotLK were, granted both had failures too, Cataclysm just doesn’t even hold a [Kobold Candle] to either.

Yes Cataclysm revamped a lot of the core of WoW, but I think it was too much all at once. Had it been broken into smaller pieces on each core overhaul, perhaps it would have come out better, but overall it felt unfinished and still does.

Can you qualify Cataclysm as a pass or fail? No, I don’t think you can. Because either phrase is finite and WoW isn’t over yet and should never be “finished”. I will say comparably though Cataclysm got much more wrong than it did right than that of prior expansions and sadly as well as confusingly, Blizzard seemed to almost toss things they claimed to have learned right out the window with this expansion as well. I don’t get that at all, if you know what has worked in the past, why ignore or go against it? I have to wonder if maybe the development team became so arrogant with this release they felt overconfident to do whatever they wanted and low and behold it blew up in their faces of course. Perhaps that’s what was needed though to get them back on track again. To Blizzard, if anyone there reads this long rant of mine, WoW has the potential to continue to be great, and if the plans for Mists of Pandaria are any indication of whats to come then the right track might be back in sight again, but please don’t lose focus and get lazy because Mists is your last shot at it. If you screw up that expansion, WoW will die out fairly soon thereafter because gamers are fickle, when you disappoint them once they will abandon you and seldom give second chances. The only reason you kind of have a second shot at redeeming the steaming pile Cata kinda ended up as is because of a loyal fan base of players like me. Please don’t disappoint again

So, by popular demand, my original posting:

So I guess I should weigh in on the “Occupy Wall Street” stuff since journalists seem to be bombarding us with it now so it must be important (/sarcasm).

Look, I am all for protesting whatever you feel needs to be changed or is unfair, or whatever the reason, the right to protest is a fundamental right in this country many people take for granted. Unfortunately, this OWS thing has gone a bit too far and is accomplishing nothing. Heres what I mean before you get all huffed about that statement…

For starters, this thing started out as a bunch of unemployed recent college grads who decided “Hey man, like Wall Street bozos have all the money man, lets protest.” Now I say that with a hippie/pothead accent because the reality of it is thats who STARTED this protest. When it first took form, some journalists gave it some press, but the problem was these initial people had:

1. no idea what they were protesting
2. no idea what they wanted as an outcome
3. no idea what sort of solution would be

Since then, politicians and activists have sadly sunken their teeth into it and twisted and forced “purpose” into it, which I use in quotes because some of the things they are protesting are not the fault, or even if in part the entire fault of Wall Street businesses. We even have people protesting the wars within this protest who are actually crazy enough to blame Wall Street for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan . Every loon is coming out of the woodwork and using this protest as an excuse to voice their crazy concepts of why this world is struggling right now and puts it on a sign.

Now granted, this is bound to happen to any protest, but this whole thing has basically started to undermine itself mainly because it lacks leadership, direction and a legitimate purpose. Its become a joke to most people because of that.

The Democratic party has unfortunately latched on with teeth to it and started using it as a campaign rally cry for 2012′s election season. Now, Im no fan of Republicans or Democrats, I am an honest independent who does happen to lean towards a more conservative side but I am very liberal about other things but I honestly and truthfully to my core hate politicians with a passion regardless of party affiliation. Anyhow, what these stupid politicians fail to see or remember is that they helped to create this situation and by rallying people against “rich people” they are causing an already steep divide in class and income to become even worse which will likely lead to violence and riots in the end (enter Greece’s latest headlines these past few months). We’ll get back to that in a minute…

Again, don’t get me wrong, there are legitimate gripes with this protest, and I see, recognize and agree with most of them. The problem isn’t with the protest fundamentals, the problem is the who blame the protest is misplacing, and also the lack of any coherent solution or end result being sought after. Right now the protesters and media is hyping that its because people are fed up with Wall Street and its all the banks and businesses that caused this financial strain and economic frustration as of late…and it isn’t entirely their fault. If we’re gonna place blame, lets do it intelligently and accurately and place it with the government as well, those very same politicians who are now walking around in front of the camera praising the protesters, they helped cause this as well. Im no fan of Mr Obama, but Im not going to use this as an excuse to bash him, however in fairness of laying blame again, his economic policies haven’t exactly helped things either as of late. So here we are protesting as a country businesses and banks and people we view as more successful than ourselves (except outspoken movie stars who always seem to be exempt from being lumped in with the “rich” and “wealthy” crowds during times like this) and yet no one is holding the politicians who made policies to allow or didnt make policies to prevent the crap that happened in 2008 which started this whole mess to begin with. Instead we have hacker groups performing “vigilante justice” in the name of the protesters being arrested by harassing the Citibank CEO in posting his email, etc etc to the world. Why? Because OMGBANKSREVIL and it just so happened that the recent mass arrests were done while the group claimed to be on their way to the local Citibank to close their accounts (CNet Article). Now…c’mon. First, lets look at this for what it is. How many protesters in the group really have Citibank accounts? I’ve never had a Citibank account in all my time alive and I’m betting not every protester arrested had one either. Not to mention, what were they doing to get arrested? I’ve walked into banks before to close my accounts because I disliked the bank and Ive come out as free of criminal charges as I did when I entered so I think there might be more to the story there. Plus, its a bank, you just dont mob a bank these days because then it makes the people who work there paranoid someone might try to rob it or something then they call the cops and cops in any situation tend to make things worse. So here we are, hacking and harassing the Citibank CEO as if he pulls some hidden strings to cause these people to be arrested instead of laying blame or even investigating accurately what happened. This is the kind of crap I’m talking about that hurts the concept of a protest.

Now getting back to the Rich vs Poor or more accurately Rich vs Middle Class divide, I saw this coming for years now. Some say how? Simple, once a business or individual reaches a level in which money becomes as common as the paper its printed on, they can buy anything including tax shelters, politicians who favor allowing them to keep their money, etc and our current system of government allows too much of this to happen. The vast amount of money needed to just run for Supreme Court justice in a locality is absolutely disgusting, and so these people partner with a business or wealthy person, get the “donations” for their campaign, then once elected, “hey, remember that 100k I gave you for that TV ad, well I need this law passed so I can make more money off these contracts so make sure you do what you can for me”. So basically the rich stay rich and the divide between wealth and the middle class worker grows because average folks can’t get a Pocket Politician or afford gobs of lawyers to find loopholes in the tax laws.

The main problem here with this divide is that people who are successful in small business are now being blamed. The term wealthy and rich used to refer to that top 1% in this country, now, I see it used to refer to anyone who happens to make more than the person speaking and thats bad. Politicians in recent months have adjusted what they consider rich to be anyone who makes over 200k a year. I’m sorry, but 200k a year is well off, not rich. That person making that much can lose it all just as easily as the person making 40k a year so thats not rich. Rich and Wealthy is where you have enough money that if you lost your main source of income tomorrow unexpectedly, you wouldnt be homeless within a few months if you couldnt find another job. Someone making 200k a year doesnt have that kind of buffer zone unless they have minimal expenses and stockpile money. The divide is increasingly worsened by politicians skirting blame for the failing economy due to arguments, partisan fighting and poor decisions in govt by blaming “rich people”. Basically from the president on down all you hear lately is something along the lines of “If the rich paid more taxes we’d all be fine and our troubles would be over”. Its getting so bad that its unpopular to be a self made successful person is this country right now (Wall Street Jounal article)

I can speak to the above first hand. I made close to 200k a year a mere 6 years ago, and when the economy took a tumble and companies began to downsize, I got laid off and my income went from nice and comfortable to absolute zero in 3 weeks time. I had a good chunk of savings put away from keeping my expenses lower than I could have, and budgeting myself well, but within a year, just trying to look for another job and survive paying my bills I drained all my savings. In my search for a job, even looking to take a cut in pay I found NOTHING and so I decided if I didnt do something soon I was going to lose it all. So, as an effort to keep myself fed and keep my bills paid, I fired up my own consulting business as a way to pay the bills till I could find a more permanent position somewhere once things improved. 6 years later I am still doing my own business and not for lack of trying to find a full time employed position elsewhere either, but because thats all I have still since the job market is still horrible. The not so nice thing now is that my clients for consulting are starting to dry up, cut back, or just flat out going out of business themselves which is hurting my income now and while for a time I was doing okay, now its a bit of a struggle to keep making my bills and payroll each month. I havent taken a personal paycheck in over 2 years now because of it and have had to let go most of my already small workforce because I just dont have the work for them anymore and no money to pay them to sit around.

The problem is not the rich people. The problem is government. It has grown so large and so imposing that its now a monster that cannot be fed. By that I mean the budget for the government is so large it outpaces income by a far and the only thing that will fix the economy for the long term is a complete overhaul of the political system in how we elect officials and the money they are allowed to raise and spend on campaigns, the tax codes need to be redone from the ground up, no more clause here and there for this company or that, everyone pays a fair even share, and a close scrutiny of where our tax money is spent so we know we arent wasting it on jobs that dont need to exist and programs that waste it. Unfortunately without these things, anything we do to “fix” the economy is just a temporary patch and we will end up in trouble again just later and sadly likely worse off.

So If you’re going to protest on Wall Street, do so in Washington DC as well because thats where most of the problems began and where the process to fix them needs to begin. Nothing will get fixed starting in New York. Wall Street businesses and banks arent the heart of the problem they are just a small piece, because sadly greed is good in moderation. Greed forces innovation (if I invent this, ill make money), drives people to do better (if I work harder, ill get promoted and make more money), influences desire for education (if I learn more about my job or get a degree I might make more money), etc. Unfortunately like anything in excess and left unchecked it gets bad quickly.

Title image courtesy of CallMePro@DeviantART

Let me start by saying my viewpoints have not changed any. I still believe that the protests have a worthwhile gripe, I just think who they are targeting, the methods being used and where they are taking place are completely wrong. This whole upset and anger is about political tie-ins with money and big business, but protesting on Wall Street and targeting CEO’s and whatnot for “hacks” and harassment arent going to fix this because the problem lies with government. Politicians are to blame for this mess as much if not more than the corporations because they had the power to regulate and stop the crap that turned this economy to shit and failed to do so in exchange for kickbacks, campaign donations, etc. Wall Street, or more specifically big businesses are simply doing what the government has allowed them to do, buy a Pocket Politician.

Im with the whole upset over this crap and I have been complaining and voicing my opinion about it for years before it sadly became the popular thing to do (perhaps Twitter brought more notoriety to it and maybe I should have jumped on the Tweet Bandwagon years earlier and griped), at any rate, I agree, Big Business money needs to leave government. Unfortunately I dont think it will without a revolution of sorts because even with the protesting, push back from voters, etc, the prob gets worse each and every year. The most sickening part of it all is its not even hidden anymore, where 10 or more years ago, you had to dig to find the corporate tie-ins, now its all out in the air practically and neither guilty party seems to care because they have so much power they think its no longer a risk.

I agree change needs to happen now, and sadly the great messiah people had voted into the presidential office who claimed those days were over has shown nothing but it being the same thing as before, just accompanied with more big speaches in front of a teleprompter. Yes, its true, Im not “Owebama” fan and never was, but then I wasnt a fan of Bush Jr’s policies or Clinton either. When a young president who promised so much and failed to deliver on any of it is able to raise the kind of money for initial election and re-election, it makes me sad because I think “Why cant that money be spent on more important and worthwhile things?” He’s projected to raise 700million to 1 billion by election day 2012 just for his campaign. Seriously, What The Fuck! Why are we allowing this to take place, why do we keep dumping money to these politicians both private party and allowing agencies and businesses to in these kinds of levels? When the presidential candidate can buy an hour and a half of prime-time air on TV networks before hes even elected president to tell the country about himself like Obama did, there’s a serious issue with where the money in this country goes.

In addition its sad when stuff like this happens:

Like I said, they dont even try to hide the favoritism here. Seems when you surpass a certain level of greed you no longer fall under the same penalties as the rest of the population. We’re almost at the point of saying “Well Done!” to these people when they reach numbers this staggering.

Every year I see us coming closer to a Running Man/Escape from LA style of government and its refreshing to see signs of life rebelling against it but we need to better focus in the right place instead of believing the political misdirection of who’s really to blame.

I tweeted last night that I thought perhaps maybe now Apple would stop doing everything in its power to inflict lawsuits on anyone who comes along with an idea potentially better than theirs or a way to improve upon what they have created, or even an idea they haven’t come up with themselves. Thats all that seems to be going on these days and sadly Apple is at the forefront of most of the technology lawsuits. I’ve watched the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s be a period of innovation and creation of technology and advancement like no other to the 2000′s be more of a “who can we sue for more money and to stop from being a worthwhile competitor?” era. I can’t say that Apple started it, because it didn’t, honestly the process was pretty much started by SCO a few years back and its lawsuit against IBM and Linux (read more here). That kind of set the precedent for all that has come since and its really disgusting and sad all at once.

The guy who ran SCO at the time was renowned for basically inventing nothing but making millions off intellectual property rights. Basically buying the rights to a technology or patented invention and then licensing it out to people and suing anyone who didnt pay his price or who made a similar invention or idea or competitive one. Suddenly larger corporations saw in this bold move an idea of “hey, we can stifle competition this way” in the sense that a small newly formed company with an idea or product will more likely cave to the pressure of a big business icon’s threat of legal action than go to market and compete. It was certainly a cheaper way to get rid of competition if you didnt have the bankroll Microsoft did and could just buy your competition like they did.

Apple seems to have taken cues from that and basically launched a campaign of lawsuits on companies with like minded technology, better technology, or competitive technology and just gone crazy. They’ve done more in the last 10 years to ruin innovation than innovate themselves. What happened to the company who was all about changing the rules of technology back in the day? Remember this commercial?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Apple went from the woman with the hammer, to the guy on the screen in just a decade. Unfortunately because of this, other companies have followed suit and now its a lawyers wet dream out there in the technology landscape. Just have a look at this:

Credit: www.informationisbeautiful.net

At any rate, I watched Apple grow, fall, and grow again in my lifetime thus far into what it is today and almost a blip on the radar screen in the early 90′s and late 80′s because of poor business decisions. Some attribute Apple’s climb to the top again to Steve Jobs’ return, and I think that part of the credit is due to that yes, but for the most part Apple gambled on a new technology at the right time and used cultivated contacts in media to push that idea along and thats what turned it around. That technology being MP3′s and downloadable music of course and basically being the first to create and market a device similar to a Sony Walkman that would allow you to take those songs with you. Then furthering it to the iTunes store in allowing people to legally buy music for cheap using the contacts Apple had garnered in the entertainment industry over its existence and with Steve’s hookups through Pixar which he also helped to found and owned. Again, good and smart business decisions, but hardly “revolutionary”, more or less in the right place at the right time to capitalize on something that was free and widespread on the internet already.

Using that momentum from the iPod and iTunes, they redid their product line and set out to make basically what I consider overpriced works of art they call computers and people foolishly buy them with the notion they are “hip” “with it” or “cool” for owning one when they could have a PC that is just as good if not better but doesnt necessarily look as sleek on a desk with a light up Apple logo. Again, not revolutionary, but a move to cater to egos in my view of people will pay a premium for something unique, fashionable and what they believe will set them apart. My grandfather used to say when I was a kid about such things:

“If you could bottle farts and sell it as a perfume to rich people, people would buy it.”

I believe that crude but rather poignant description of fashion and trends applies to how Apple came to success. Same applies to the iPhone, smart phones were not invented by Apple, yet some people honestly are ignorant enough to believe that true. Microsoft had been marketing Windows Smartphones for years prior as did Palm, but they cost a small fortune at the time and were rather crude in what they could do. Again, enter Apple with an eye for catching technology trends and re-did the iPod in a phone to basically encompass what people carry with them most in one device instead of 2. “I can have my music and my phone with me wherever I go and only carry one item!”.

These are all key business moves at the right time done the right way to capitalize on already existing technology. All they did was put their own Apple spin on them, market it well, and made money. Lets face it, Apple marketers are almost as good as Volkswagen marketers. They can sell a Ketchup Popsicle to a woman in white gloves as David Spade would say in Tommy Boy. These days thats all you need sadly, people with disposable income, and even those without will buy anything if you can make it look cool and make it appear as though they would be less cool not having one.

So I dont relish in the fact that Steve Jobs is dead. A life lost, especially to cancer is sad regardless who it is. My irritability over this saturation on the net and elsewhere about his death is due to him being given too much credit for what he’s done. Steve Jobs did not invent the personal computer, he marketed it. Woz built them, Jobs sold them. He had an uncanny mind for what people would buy and what was good business sense, although the tradeoff was he was a legendary micro manager. So if we are going to honor the memory of Steve Jobs, lets credit him for what he is and not what he isnt or didnt do. He was a fantastic businessman who changed the face of technology business in the modern era. Some say for good, some say for the worse, and I have to say its a bit of both in my opinion.

Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone, he didnt invent the personal computer, he didnt even invent MP3′s or MP3 players. He was a great thinker in terms of sales who took those already existing ideas and made a way to profit off them unlike others had thought to do before him. Did he improve upon those ideas some? Yes, but he alone did not, the faceless engineers in his employ did most of that. Even still, that is something respectable to credit him for.

Is this the wrong way to look at things? Maybe, I cant say for sure and honestly I think the whole situation is more or less subjective and based on the individual. We could debate all day long on it and there is nothing to say in absolutes who is wrong and who is right.

Anyhow, I do a lot for a lot of people on a daily basis. Not even just in my guild, but as a whole, most of my life these days seems to be dedicated to making everyone else happy and forgetting or foregoing my own needs and wants most of the time. Is that right? Eh, prob not but again, subjective. I kind of like doing for others, makes me feel good about being me, so I guess in the larger scheme of things, doing for others does for me as well in a small way.

What I dont like, prob good to use the word “hate” in, is doing for others, then making one minor mistake and being made to feel as though I fucked up in a royal sense and its kind of like a big WTF?!. Almost makes me believe that when it happens perhaps ive done too much and allowed others to take from me too much where they no longer see it as me being nice and going above and beyond for them but more expecting it and when it isnt delivered exactly as they want it, they bitch.

I make mistakes, and I never claim to be perfect. I do my best to stay impartial on all things WoW and Guild related, but Im not gonna lie, its hard, and sometimes I get a little lazy and make hasty decisions which I dont think through or pay attention to, then people read too much into those said decisions and all hell breaks looks. For example, if I say to someone that perhaps their DPS is a little lower than expected, if I happen to use the wrong words, its taken as “Shadow says your DPS sucks” which is usually not what Im saying but holy hell, if I dont word it right its the end of the world and from then on Ive now said so-and-so’s DPS sucks.

Maybe it goes along the lines of the whole “holding leaders and icons to too high a standard” thing. Like when a celebrity does something like oh idk, Charlie Sheen. Why Charlie? Because we havent beaten that news headline to death yet in the world, but hes a great example. The guy has money and fame, and what he chooses to do with those things suddenly becomes everyone’s damn business when he happens to choose things that are say morally questionable to the status quo. He sleeps with many women and does coke and drinks a lot but OMFG WTF CHARLIE?! YOU VILE HUMAN BEING! Really? Why do we care so much what Charlie does with his life and money? Does it affect us in any way? No, but because hes so famous from his acting and family everyone has to weigh in on what Charlie should do with his life instead and how “wrong” his decisions are.

So without deviating to much off track, my point here is that it seems when I make a mistake compared to say someone else, its more of a HOLY SHIT SHADOW! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!? Even if said mistake is say walking on the lawn where a sign reads “keep off the Grass”. Whereas when someone else makes a mistake, regardless of how large or small it may be, its more of a whimper. This double standard shit really irks me and Im honestly tired of it.

Example in question: (last night)

ik out all gl find a better leader that dont show favoritism

Which I take to mean “im out all”, but anyhow, one minor hasty mistake decision and suddenly im such a bad leader. Its like being charged for “Jaywalking” if I were pushed out of a moving car. Or perhaps being accused of kidnapping for asking someone to go to lunch with me. I mean really, what the fuck?