Note - This is an abandoned script and done in notepad with no spell check. And I'm real bad at spelling.
10 Awesome tips for making gold in wow
Now, towards the end of wrath and all throughout Cata I was one of, if not the largest supplier of goods on my relms auction house. A lot has changed though from those days, But some of the basics of gold making are still the same..
Now for making gold while leveling Weather it be a new toon on a different server or your 9th alt, its all the same.
1.)First off, if you plan on leveling by doing quests take 2 gathering proffessions. Once you hit max level you'll unlearn them and get 2 real proffession.
There are 3 gathering proffessions to choose from, Mining, Skinning, and Herbalism. Which two are best depends on your server. Generally you want to take skinning with either mining of herbing, because if you take both herbing and mining you'll spend most of your time doing your quests gathering and running from one node to the other. So which one you pick is pretty much personal preference, low level herbs sell well because alchemy is such a good proffession to level on multiple toons at max level and they need low level herbs to skill up. Same with mining. Blacksmithing and Jewel crafting are 2 really good proffessions at max level and they need tons of low level ore to skill up. When you sell the ore sell both the ore raw and bars. Un-smelted ore, or "raw ore" will sell faster and in bigger numbers.Bars can be sold for more gold, but they do not sell as fast as ore and you won't be able to sell as many. Herbs on the other hand you just sell as is, scribes who mill the herbs just strait up buy herbs, but rarely do they buy low level herbs to mill, almost all sales for low level herbs are for leveling alchemy. And finally skinning, low level leather, like herbs and ore, sell very well.
If you plan on leveling through dungeons, then take enchanting and tailoring. Enchanting to Disenchant low level items, the materials you get sell well, especcially gear that's DE'ed in the 50-60 level area before outlands. Most people go strait to outlands at level 56 so high level mats from before BC stuff is rare. Tailoring is because you'll be getting a lot of cloth from dungeons and you can level it up as you go cheaper, then when you hit BC levels of tailoring you can make netherweave bags which sell well all the time. Alternatly you can take skinning in place of tailoring because some dungeons do have beast you can skin.
2.)While leveling check all vendors for recipes. People are lazy and would rather pay 10g for a recipe on the auction house rather than fly out to the vendor and buy it for 50c. Same with vendor pets, but not bags. Do not buy bags from vendors to flip on the Auction house. They cost way to much and do not sell well at all. "Flip" of course, means to buy low and sell high.
3.)Now when it comes to posting on the Auction house, always sell raw materials, meaning your ore, herbs, leather, and enchanting materials in stacks of 20 or whatever the highest you can get the stacks. If someone is going to buy some mats, "mats" being short for materials, that they need, then they are just going to buy whatever is cheaper. If all they need is 4 ore, they'll buy your whole stack 9 times out of 10.
When undercutting your competion, simply undercut by 1c. People will always buy whatever is cheaper and if you have 10 stacks of ore 1c cheaper then the guy who has 20 stacks of ore posted, 90% of the time they'll buy your ore first. The only reason to ever undercut by more than a copper is when you are deliberatly trying to tank a market. What that involes is posting an item way below everyone else in the hopes that your competition will undercut you at that low price. Then you simple cancle all your auctions and buy everything your compition posted and repost your items along with your new stock at higher prices than normal for a quick profit.
4.)buy the 16 slot bags from the AH whenever you have the gold to do so. Having bigger bags means less time running back to town to empty them which in tail gives you more time to level. Also if you plan on leveling in any other way besides dungeon grinding or questing then your going to be poor when you hit 90.
5.)Never vender greens. Ever. Post all of them on the AH. Even the crappy stat ones will fetch you more from people leveling up enchanting than you would get form a vender. Same goes for cloth, its worth more to other people than you can get from the vendor.
6.)Make a banker toon. Now this may seem very obvious and I'm sure 99% of the players already have one, but if your a new player watching this and you dont have one you should. A banker is another character whos is made for the sole purpose of sitting in a major city next to a mailbox close to an auctioneer. Having a banker allows you to just mail your stuff to your banker instead of going back to a major city to sell your stuff. Time is money afterall
7.) farming does not mean free. Farming of course, means using a gathering profession to go out and gather a ton of materials or grinding for a rare drop. Farming takes time, and is only free if you absolutley do not value your time. This is a common misconception made by people who are starting out in gold making.
8.)If I dont farm, how do I make gold then? you might ask yourself since all my tips before where for new players essentially. Well there are many ways but the most commone way is through crafting professions. Jewelcrafting and Enchanting being the higest earners.
9.) if your a blacksmith, make belt buckles. Belt buckles always sell like hot cakes. if your an engineer, make mecho hogs and pets. Beleive it or not people still buy those. if your a tailor, make bags and spell threads. If your a leather worker, leg enchants are the way to go. Alchemy is all about using your transmute cooldowns because potions and flasks do not sell well and rarely will you make a profit off of them. Before cata, glyphs use to be up there with enchating and jewelcrafting in terms of money making, now its barely better than leather working or alchemy in the gold making department. Fortune cookies however, still sell pretty well. People love to gamble.
10.) Learn how to do the truffle shuffle. The ore shuffle actually. Bascically all it entails is buying cheap ore whenever you can find it, prospecting all of it, and useing the gems for transmutes and making necklances and rings to DE. The ore shuffle should give you all the mats you need for enchanting and jewelcrafting, the two biggest money makers.
Monday, December 31, 2018
Monday, December 24, 2018
My warcraft story
Note - This is an abandoned script and done in notepad with no spell check. And I'm real bad at spelling.
My warcraft story
-wow was an escape, but not for the usual reasons
-played other mmos first, talk about those
-little brother asked me to install it
-guy from work recommended it
-mulgore was first zone
In order to tell the story on how I got into world of Warcraft, and then started making a living making videos on the game, I have to first talk about pokemon.
When I was in 4th grade, a friend of mine name Jose got Pokemon blue and let me borrow it. I had a gameboy color and only 1 game on it, so I was super excited to try out something new. So I go onto pokemon blue and just start exploring the world. I think my friend had already chosen a starter and only got to the first town, so it was pretty close to the start of the game. So I took my bulbasaur and pidgeys and started just grinding levels. It was my first time ever playing an rpg and I loved going up in levels and getting new abilities, plus the eveolutions were pretty sick too. I gave the game back to my friend a few times and he was happy that I had gotten so many levels for his pokemon, that he just kept letting me borrow it until I beat the game for him basically. When I finally got around to the eleite four, my venasaur was at like level 80 something and I swept through them all pretty easily on my first try. Because I had just out-leveled them all.
Then I just gave the game back to my friend and bought yellow version some years later and beat that as well. Then I bought all the new versions that came out and had a blast with gold and silver version. In those games, you got to get 16 badges and fight pokemon trainer Red at the end, whos pokemon were all around level 80 or something, which really rewarded my constant grinding. After I had beaten gold and silver, and collected all the pokemon I could, I reset the game and just played through them again and again. And then when crystal version came out, oh boy. I never touched gold or silver ever again and played the game probably more than I've played anything else.
All that to say, I fucking loved leveling. And just playing video games in general.
Fast forward to my highschool years. My mom was given a computer through like some charity or something so I had internet for the first time. I should probably also mention I was poor as fuck. I'm pretty sure the only reason I had a gameboy color when I was little was because my mom took it from the lost in found when she was working as a hotel maid or something. And the only way I was able to buy games was through a combination of saving birthday money and returning old games for store credit.
anyways, with internet for the first time, I thought I'd try out some browser based rgps. The first one I tried was maple story, and I actually have another video on this channel about why I stopped playing that. To summerize it though, Maple story was were I learned what cybering was and I thought it was really weird so I just logged out and never went back. Then I tried out Runescape, because everyone talked about how good it was since you could explore the world n shit. It was fun enough, but I got stuck in some building that required me to have a paid subscription in order to get past, so I just stopped playing since I didnt like the concept of having to pay for content in game when it boasted to be a free to play game. Plus I didnt have money to pay for it anyway. So I went to other browser based mmo's, and tried out a few and fell in love with one called Fallensword.
Fallensword, for a browser based rpg, had a ton of depth that I never saw in pokemon games. The game had no level cap, and was totally pay to win looking back on it. But I had no idea what that meant. All I know is I played the hell out of that game. You couldnt spend all day leveling mind you, you had to spend stamina to move, and stamina to fight. And fights were autodecided based on your stats, gear, and talent points. And you could have it set to auto-complte the fights so fights would last like a second. The strategy in that game was to just put all points into attack stats to finish the fight in 1 round, because every attack spent your stamina. And there were not a lot of quests in the game, I can only remember ever doing like 5 quests total I think, so all your leveling was done by grinding monsters. But monsters gave a lot of experience points so it wasnt really that bad, afterall the game was designed around that. But after like, half an hour of playing you'd usually run out of stamina for the day and that was it. You could check the auction house and work on your gear, and that was about it. But I would play that game all day every day. I dont even know how thinking back on it. They did update the game with stuff every now and again to add stuff to the game to do outside of leveling.
I also tried starting my own guild in the game, but that did not turn out well. Guilds had some really nice advantages in that game. For one, you got a guild bank which was great because backpack space was very limited. You could also have guild battle to control towers throughout the game to get exclusive guild wide buffs. And these buffs were good too, so top guilds were always fighting for them. I eventually just abandoned the guild I made and applied to join a top one that I fit the requirements of. And holy crap was it great being in a big guild like that. They had rules on the forum about how you had to log in and play everyday and use your stamina. And if you were going to not be able to log in for some time, you had to make a post on the guild forum stating how long you'll be gone and why. Guild space was limited, and the guild level was based on xp it got from guild memebers when they leveled up, and the guild had its own talents point which were super good to have. Plus the guild had all these rare weapons and items in the guild bank that were free for anyone to use. So I could just constantly borrow the best gear for my level and level up that much quicker with all these guild buffs as well as help out in guild battles. Plus the guild forums were pretty active, so I took part in discussions pretty regularly there, and thats were I learned about wow. The guild leader use to play wow and would talk about it occasionally. Well bash the game really, they would all just bad talk the game and talk about why they quit. So I did not have a good opinion of the game and had no inclination to ever play it.
Then about a year later I got my own job. There was a guy at work who played wow and when we worked together, he would tell me all about how great it was. But I was conflicted, I'd heard nothing but bad things about the game from my guild, but the things he was saying about the game had me just so interested. Apparently you could level up for as long as you wanted in the game! Imagine that. No wait, that cant be true., If you could level non stop then why would you ever stop playing the game? I thought. So I didn't really believe him.
Then one day, we got a free trial CD in the mail, and my little brother brought it to me and asked if I could install it on the PC so he could try it. And I was all like, "ok I guess" and begrudgingly installed wow.
After it was done installing, I tried it out to see what it was like, and made a tauren Hunter named Hirumared. Quick story about the name, I always named my characters in video games "Red" since I was a big fan of pokemon trainer Red in the gold and silver games, but Red was never an available name online, so I would just put the name of an anime character in front.
ok, so my first time in mulgore as a hunter was, pretty neat I guess. I had no idea what I was doing. I was a hunter, yet I had to attack things with my melee weapon, since I could only get in 1 shot before they got into my melee range. So I ran around the starter zone, wacking stuff with my weapon, trying to use the clunky ass ability called raptor strike, and it was pretty fun leveling up. It wasnt until I left the starting village and headed to Bloodhoof village that I fell in love with the game. You see, I was not use to doing quests, and tried leveling up by killing monsters, so it took me a long time to get out of the super beginning level 1-5 zone. And the run towards Bloodhoof village was just breathtaking. I have always been a big fan of open plains landscape, and thats all Mulgore was, just a giant ass open grassy plains. I explored literally everything in that zone, and holy crap my first time getting to thunder bluff was overwhelming. It was so big, and you needed to use an elevator to get to it. And holy crap at level 10 I got to tame a pet? And holy crap, you really can level forever, theres nothing stopping me from not playing. I dont think I would have kept playing if I had started in a different starting zone. Luckily I choose tauren.
I was so hooked, I dont think I've ever been as hooked on something as I was when I first started playing wow. I wasnt too into at first, but thats because I went in with a negative mind set. Once I left the cramped starting area and went out to explore the rest of the zone, that was it for me. I got to do my 2 favorite things, grind endlessly, and explore a gigantic open world of my favorite landscape.
My little brother didnt get to try the game for the first time until a few days later, because I just could not stop playing.
But I didnt really have to much time to play. At this point in my life, I was in highschool, played sports, and had a part time job. The job was cool because it allowed me to easily pay the subscription fee, but that took up half of my weekends, since I'd always work Saturday and Sunday. At school, we had morning practice for football at 6am. And the rule for morning practice were to be in the weight room lifting by 6am, or else you had to run after practice. So I had to wake up at 5 every morning for that stupid shit. Then practice after school lasted until 7 o-clock normally, so by time I got home, showered, and ate dinner, it would be around 8 or 9 o-clock. Luckily I was a smart kid so I never had homework, so for those 2 hours before I had to go to bed to wake up at 5 am the next day, I got to play wow. And those were the best 2 hours of the day.
Wow was my escape, but not for the normal reason people use video games as an escape. I was just so damn busy all the time, that it was nice to escape into a fantasy world for a few hours a day to relax. I also didnt talk to anyone while playing wow, I tried my best to be as anti-social as I could in the game to the point were I didnt even join a guild until I had been playing for like 6 months. I had to talk to people all day at school, at practice, and at work, And wow was my alone time. A place where I could finally take a break from people. And my goodness was it great.
If friends invited me to go out, I'd tell them, "no, I'm gonna play wow tonight" And eventually they'd stop asking. Is what I'd like to say but I'm pretty sure they thought I was joking and kept asking me all the time anyway until highschool ended. Looking back on it, they were pretty great friends. But at the time, I just thought it was mildly annoying since I gave them the same answer every time.
So I was a busy bee, enjoying wow for about 2 hours a day, and a little more on weekends when I got home from work, until my senior year of highschool. Thankfully, luckily, during practice one day, while we were doing hitting drills, I injured my shoulder. It wasnt to bad, I had hurt it a few months earlier, with what I thought might be nerve damage, but I could just grit through the pain. But this time around, the pain didnt go away after practice. So I went to the personal trainers before practice the next day and had them take a look at it, and they said I sprained my rotator joint or something, so I got to just ice it up and not practice.
And boy, I was the happiest kid in town. I left practice early that day and just went home and played wow. The next day I just left early as well, and it was the best. I have never been so happy in my life to be injured, bucause it meant i could go home during pracitce to play more wow. And sometimes I'd even just not show up to pracitce at all and just leave right after shool. It was literally the best. I couldnt do that everyday though, because the coach started to notice, and I had to keep coming to keep up appearances. So I would just talk to the other injured players about wow, No one else on the team played wow, but that didnt stop me from talking about it anyway. I have never been shy about my hobbies, and no one ever gave me any kind of shit about it. I also learned that people are not interested when you talk on and on about a hobby they have no interest in. So eventually I just talked about wow to them all the time to annoy them because I thought it was funny for some reason.
Then, as the end of the football season drew near, my shoulder was slowly getting better, but I milked the puppy for as long as possible. Our team usually lost in the first round of the playoffs, if I could just hold out until then I'd be fine I told myself. Well, to my dismay, that was the first time in 18 years that our team made it all the way to the finals. I was not able to fool the personal trainers that long, so I eventually had to go back to practice for the last week before the final game. I didnt play in the game, and practice was light so it wasnt that bad.
But after football was over I was finally free at last. I could play all the wow I wanted after school.
In the next semester, I had my schedule set so that I could go home during lunch, since I had the last 2 periods off. So I just drove home during lunch and skipped all the traffic and got to play so much wow it was ridiculous. Once I graduated highschool, I decided to take a year off before decided on weather or not I'd go to college, and I also cut all of my friends out of my life. I did not return their calls and just ignore them until they stopped talking to me so that I could just focus on playing wow 24/7. Well, at least until I had to go to work on the weekends anyway. I still had to pay for my subscription afterall.
So how did my year off from everything and only play wow for a year work out for me?
Well, that was THE best year of my life. It was better than I thought it could possibly be. I actually got to raid, since I could actually stick to a raid squedule since I wasnt crazy busy all the time anymore. I got to level up so many alts, I got to grind so many battlegrounds, I got super into the auction house and became super rich in game. Everything was just the best. You'd think I'd burn out on wow playing it that much BUT NOPE, that didnt happen until a few years later in mop. I was just crazy into the game. And then cataclysm came out around that time too so I had this giant new expansion to explore. I ended up raiding on 2 raid teams, one on my priest, and another on my hunter. when LFR came out, I had all 10 toons on my server at max level, with raid viable gear and specific professions to make the maximum amount of gold possible. You'd think if I would have burned out it would have been there, but not even close. I even organize my own rated battle ground teams as well as lead the raid group on my hunter. My guild was the biggest guild on the server, with the best pvpers, and the 2nd, and 3rd best raid teams. Of which, I healed on my priest in one, and Dps'ed on my hunter in the other. I also had friends in the guild who had the best raid team on the server and I would fill in for them sometimes on one of my many raid ready alts. My life was basically just playing wow.
Then later on, some stuff happened, I got kicked from my raid group on my hunter, yadidada, guild drama, a crazy psycho jealous boyfreind incident with an arena partner, and MOP comes around.
I wasnt really in the right state of mind to really go all out in Mop like I did in cataclysm, so I stopped leveling all my alts, only raided on 1 team, stopped palying the auction house, and only did the bare minimum amount of dailies to unlock patters and vendor items for raiding. It was in mists that I was basically only logging in to raid and for nothing else.
Then I got fired from my job, and something else personal happened, and I knew I was going to go to a negative place. In order to change my mindset and not allow myself to even have the chance to be depressed, I decided to try a couple of things that I've always wanted to do, but never got around to for one reason or another. One of the things was make youtube videos again. SO I made some fake guides for classes, modeled after pyrion Flaxes Dota2 fake guides, with the ms paint drawings and everything. But man are those videos so bad. But I also had a lot of fun making them, and they took so much time to make that it was keeping my mind occupied, so I just went on a video making binge, and started making my "history of X ability" series around this time, which actually got some decent views. I remember putting so much time and effort into researching and editing together the "history of paladin seals" video, and the posting it on reddit and then watching it hit the front page was such a good high. It was great to see something I put so much time and effort into getting some recognition. And I was finally turning my mind set around and getting to a better place. But then that night, Literally the day I uploaded the pally seal video, while I was on my run, I was attacked by 2 men with a gun. What a perfect event to round off a perfect year of just everything going wrong for me.
But rather than give up, I just went right back to making videos. And it wasnt even really a big deal. It should have been, that should have been the straw to break the camels back. How often do you have a whole bunch of shitty things happen to you one after the other, and then come back from staring death in the face? By just making more videos thats how! And deal with mild PTSD and flashbacks for a couple of months. But hey, its not like I needed to leave the house anyway, I didnt have a job anymore afterall.
So I just kept making videos, and about a year later I was finally making enough to live off of the income from my channel. I didnt think it would happen, it was totally a pipe dream I thought. I started too late afterall, it was already 2013, and there were so many bigger channels on youtube that there was no way I would get noticed. Well it turns out that wasnt true, and I did get noticed.
As for now, well I'm too busy making videos all the time to play the game as much as I use too. I still play a lot more than just logging in to raid, but no where near the levels of when I use to no-life the game.
Do I regret cutting all my friends out of my life to play wow after highschool? Yah a little bit. I do and I dont. For one, that was the best year of my life and I cant help but look back on that time with fondness.And I could have never had that year unlessI did what I did. And two, I could always just re-connect with them later on in life if I want, which I did do with a couple. But I also made so many new friends through wow and youtube that Its not really a big concern of mine. Plus highschool was like 6 or 7 years ago now(9 years now), so all of them are adults with jobs and kids and responsibilities. God I feel old.
My warcraft story
-wow was an escape, but not for the usual reasons
-played other mmos first, talk about those
-little brother asked me to install it
-guy from work recommended it
-mulgore was first zone
In order to tell the story on how I got into world of Warcraft, and then started making a living making videos on the game, I have to first talk about pokemon.
When I was in 4th grade, a friend of mine name Jose got Pokemon blue and let me borrow it. I had a gameboy color and only 1 game on it, so I was super excited to try out something new. So I go onto pokemon blue and just start exploring the world. I think my friend had already chosen a starter and only got to the first town, so it was pretty close to the start of the game. So I took my bulbasaur and pidgeys and started just grinding levels. It was my first time ever playing an rpg and I loved going up in levels and getting new abilities, plus the eveolutions were pretty sick too. I gave the game back to my friend a few times and he was happy that I had gotten so many levels for his pokemon, that he just kept letting me borrow it until I beat the game for him basically. When I finally got around to the eleite four, my venasaur was at like level 80 something and I swept through them all pretty easily on my first try. Because I had just out-leveled them all.
Then I just gave the game back to my friend and bought yellow version some years later and beat that as well. Then I bought all the new versions that came out and had a blast with gold and silver version. In those games, you got to get 16 badges and fight pokemon trainer Red at the end, whos pokemon were all around level 80 or something, which really rewarded my constant grinding. After I had beaten gold and silver, and collected all the pokemon I could, I reset the game and just played through them again and again. And then when crystal version came out, oh boy. I never touched gold or silver ever again and played the game probably more than I've played anything else.
All that to say, I fucking loved leveling. And just playing video games in general.
Fast forward to my highschool years. My mom was given a computer through like some charity or something so I had internet for the first time. I should probably also mention I was poor as fuck. I'm pretty sure the only reason I had a gameboy color when I was little was because my mom took it from the lost in found when she was working as a hotel maid or something. And the only way I was able to buy games was through a combination of saving birthday money and returning old games for store credit.
anyways, with internet for the first time, I thought I'd try out some browser based rgps. The first one I tried was maple story, and I actually have another video on this channel about why I stopped playing that. To summerize it though, Maple story was were I learned what cybering was and I thought it was really weird so I just logged out and never went back. Then I tried out Runescape, because everyone talked about how good it was since you could explore the world n shit. It was fun enough, but I got stuck in some building that required me to have a paid subscription in order to get past, so I just stopped playing since I didnt like the concept of having to pay for content in game when it boasted to be a free to play game. Plus I didnt have money to pay for it anyway. So I went to other browser based mmo's, and tried out a few and fell in love with one called Fallensword.
Fallensword, for a browser based rpg, had a ton of depth that I never saw in pokemon games. The game had no level cap, and was totally pay to win looking back on it. But I had no idea what that meant. All I know is I played the hell out of that game. You couldnt spend all day leveling mind you, you had to spend stamina to move, and stamina to fight. And fights were autodecided based on your stats, gear, and talent points. And you could have it set to auto-complte the fights so fights would last like a second. The strategy in that game was to just put all points into attack stats to finish the fight in 1 round, because every attack spent your stamina. And there were not a lot of quests in the game, I can only remember ever doing like 5 quests total I think, so all your leveling was done by grinding monsters. But monsters gave a lot of experience points so it wasnt really that bad, afterall the game was designed around that. But after like, half an hour of playing you'd usually run out of stamina for the day and that was it. You could check the auction house and work on your gear, and that was about it. But I would play that game all day every day. I dont even know how thinking back on it. They did update the game with stuff every now and again to add stuff to the game to do outside of leveling.
I also tried starting my own guild in the game, but that did not turn out well. Guilds had some really nice advantages in that game. For one, you got a guild bank which was great because backpack space was very limited. You could also have guild battle to control towers throughout the game to get exclusive guild wide buffs. And these buffs were good too, so top guilds were always fighting for them. I eventually just abandoned the guild I made and applied to join a top one that I fit the requirements of. And holy crap was it great being in a big guild like that. They had rules on the forum about how you had to log in and play everyday and use your stamina. And if you were going to not be able to log in for some time, you had to make a post on the guild forum stating how long you'll be gone and why. Guild space was limited, and the guild level was based on xp it got from guild memebers when they leveled up, and the guild had its own talents point which were super good to have. Plus the guild had all these rare weapons and items in the guild bank that were free for anyone to use. So I could just constantly borrow the best gear for my level and level up that much quicker with all these guild buffs as well as help out in guild battles. Plus the guild forums were pretty active, so I took part in discussions pretty regularly there, and thats were I learned about wow. The guild leader use to play wow and would talk about it occasionally. Well bash the game really, they would all just bad talk the game and talk about why they quit. So I did not have a good opinion of the game and had no inclination to ever play it.
Then about a year later I got my own job. There was a guy at work who played wow and when we worked together, he would tell me all about how great it was. But I was conflicted, I'd heard nothing but bad things about the game from my guild, but the things he was saying about the game had me just so interested. Apparently you could level up for as long as you wanted in the game! Imagine that. No wait, that cant be true., If you could level non stop then why would you ever stop playing the game? I thought. So I didn't really believe him.
Then one day, we got a free trial CD in the mail, and my little brother brought it to me and asked if I could install it on the PC so he could try it. And I was all like, "ok I guess" and begrudgingly installed wow.
After it was done installing, I tried it out to see what it was like, and made a tauren Hunter named Hirumared. Quick story about the name, I always named my characters in video games "Red" since I was a big fan of pokemon trainer Red in the gold and silver games, but Red was never an available name online, so I would just put the name of an anime character in front.
ok, so my first time in mulgore as a hunter was, pretty neat I guess. I had no idea what I was doing. I was a hunter, yet I had to attack things with my melee weapon, since I could only get in 1 shot before they got into my melee range. So I ran around the starter zone, wacking stuff with my weapon, trying to use the clunky ass ability called raptor strike, and it was pretty fun leveling up. It wasnt until I left the starting village and headed to Bloodhoof village that I fell in love with the game. You see, I was not use to doing quests, and tried leveling up by killing monsters, so it took me a long time to get out of the super beginning level 1-5 zone. And the run towards Bloodhoof village was just breathtaking. I have always been a big fan of open plains landscape, and thats all Mulgore was, just a giant ass open grassy plains. I explored literally everything in that zone, and holy crap my first time getting to thunder bluff was overwhelming. It was so big, and you needed to use an elevator to get to it. And holy crap at level 10 I got to tame a pet? And holy crap, you really can level forever, theres nothing stopping me from not playing. I dont think I would have kept playing if I had started in a different starting zone. Luckily I choose tauren.
I was so hooked, I dont think I've ever been as hooked on something as I was when I first started playing wow. I wasnt too into at first, but thats because I went in with a negative mind set. Once I left the cramped starting area and went out to explore the rest of the zone, that was it for me. I got to do my 2 favorite things, grind endlessly, and explore a gigantic open world of my favorite landscape.
My little brother didnt get to try the game for the first time until a few days later, because I just could not stop playing.
But I didnt really have to much time to play. At this point in my life, I was in highschool, played sports, and had a part time job. The job was cool because it allowed me to easily pay the subscription fee, but that took up half of my weekends, since I'd always work Saturday and Sunday. At school, we had morning practice for football at 6am. And the rule for morning practice were to be in the weight room lifting by 6am, or else you had to run after practice. So I had to wake up at 5 every morning for that stupid shit. Then practice after school lasted until 7 o-clock normally, so by time I got home, showered, and ate dinner, it would be around 8 or 9 o-clock. Luckily I was a smart kid so I never had homework, so for those 2 hours before I had to go to bed to wake up at 5 am the next day, I got to play wow. And those were the best 2 hours of the day.
Wow was my escape, but not for the normal reason people use video games as an escape. I was just so damn busy all the time, that it was nice to escape into a fantasy world for a few hours a day to relax. I also didnt talk to anyone while playing wow, I tried my best to be as anti-social as I could in the game to the point were I didnt even join a guild until I had been playing for like 6 months. I had to talk to people all day at school, at practice, and at work, And wow was my alone time. A place where I could finally take a break from people. And my goodness was it great.
If friends invited me to go out, I'd tell them, "no, I'm gonna play wow tonight" And eventually they'd stop asking. Is what I'd like to say but I'm pretty sure they thought I was joking and kept asking me all the time anyway until highschool ended. Looking back on it, they were pretty great friends. But at the time, I just thought it was mildly annoying since I gave them the same answer every time.
So I was a busy bee, enjoying wow for about 2 hours a day, and a little more on weekends when I got home from work, until my senior year of highschool. Thankfully, luckily, during practice one day, while we were doing hitting drills, I injured my shoulder. It wasnt to bad, I had hurt it a few months earlier, with what I thought might be nerve damage, but I could just grit through the pain. But this time around, the pain didnt go away after practice. So I went to the personal trainers before practice the next day and had them take a look at it, and they said I sprained my rotator joint or something, so I got to just ice it up and not practice.
And boy, I was the happiest kid in town. I left practice early that day and just went home and played wow. The next day I just left early as well, and it was the best. I have never been so happy in my life to be injured, bucause it meant i could go home during pracitce to play more wow. And sometimes I'd even just not show up to pracitce at all and just leave right after shool. It was literally the best. I couldnt do that everyday though, because the coach started to notice, and I had to keep coming to keep up appearances. So I would just talk to the other injured players about wow, No one else on the team played wow, but that didnt stop me from talking about it anyway. I have never been shy about my hobbies, and no one ever gave me any kind of shit about it. I also learned that people are not interested when you talk on and on about a hobby they have no interest in. So eventually I just talked about wow to them all the time to annoy them because I thought it was funny for some reason.
Then, as the end of the football season drew near, my shoulder was slowly getting better, but I milked the puppy for as long as possible. Our team usually lost in the first round of the playoffs, if I could just hold out until then I'd be fine I told myself. Well, to my dismay, that was the first time in 18 years that our team made it all the way to the finals. I was not able to fool the personal trainers that long, so I eventually had to go back to practice for the last week before the final game. I didnt play in the game, and practice was light so it wasnt that bad.
But after football was over I was finally free at last. I could play all the wow I wanted after school.
In the next semester, I had my schedule set so that I could go home during lunch, since I had the last 2 periods off. So I just drove home during lunch and skipped all the traffic and got to play so much wow it was ridiculous. Once I graduated highschool, I decided to take a year off before decided on weather or not I'd go to college, and I also cut all of my friends out of my life. I did not return their calls and just ignore them until they stopped talking to me so that I could just focus on playing wow 24/7. Well, at least until I had to go to work on the weekends anyway. I still had to pay for my subscription afterall.
So how did my year off from everything and only play wow for a year work out for me?
Well, that was THE best year of my life. It was better than I thought it could possibly be. I actually got to raid, since I could actually stick to a raid squedule since I wasnt crazy busy all the time anymore. I got to level up so many alts, I got to grind so many battlegrounds, I got super into the auction house and became super rich in game. Everything was just the best. You'd think I'd burn out on wow playing it that much BUT NOPE, that didnt happen until a few years later in mop. I was just crazy into the game. And then cataclysm came out around that time too so I had this giant new expansion to explore. I ended up raiding on 2 raid teams, one on my priest, and another on my hunter. when LFR came out, I had all 10 toons on my server at max level, with raid viable gear and specific professions to make the maximum amount of gold possible. You'd think if I would have burned out it would have been there, but not even close. I even organize my own rated battle ground teams as well as lead the raid group on my hunter. My guild was the biggest guild on the server, with the best pvpers, and the 2nd, and 3rd best raid teams. Of which, I healed on my priest in one, and Dps'ed on my hunter in the other. I also had friends in the guild who had the best raid team on the server and I would fill in for them sometimes on one of my many raid ready alts. My life was basically just playing wow.
Then later on, some stuff happened, I got kicked from my raid group on my hunter, yadidada, guild drama, a crazy psycho jealous boyfreind incident with an arena partner, and MOP comes around.
I wasnt really in the right state of mind to really go all out in Mop like I did in cataclysm, so I stopped leveling all my alts, only raided on 1 team, stopped palying the auction house, and only did the bare minimum amount of dailies to unlock patters and vendor items for raiding. It was in mists that I was basically only logging in to raid and for nothing else.
Then I got fired from my job, and something else personal happened, and I knew I was going to go to a negative place. In order to change my mindset and not allow myself to even have the chance to be depressed, I decided to try a couple of things that I've always wanted to do, but never got around to for one reason or another. One of the things was make youtube videos again. SO I made some fake guides for classes, modeled after pyrion Flaxes Dota2 fake guides, with the ms paint drawings and everything. But man are those videos so bad. But I also had a lot of fun making them, and they took so much time to make that it was keeping my mind occupied, so I just went on a video making binge, and started making my "history of X ability" series around this time, which actually got some decent views. I remember putting so much time and effort into researching and editing together the "history of paladin seals" video, and the posting it on reddit and then watching it hit the front page was such a good high. It was great to see something I put so much time and effort into getting some recognition. And I was finally turning my mind set around and getting to a better place. But then that night, Literally the day I uploaded the pally seal video, while I was on my run, I was attacked by 2 men with a gun. What a perfect event to round off a perfect year of just everything going wrong for me.
But rather than give up, I just went right back to making videos. And it wasnt even really a big deal. It should have been, that should have been the straw to break the camels back. How often do you have a whole bunch of shitty things happen to you one after the other, and then come back from staring death in the face? By just making more videos thats how! And deal with mild PTSD and flashbacks for a couple of months. But hey, its not like I needed to leave the house anyway, I didnt have a job anymore afterall.
So I just kept making videos, and about a year later I was finally making enough to live off of the income from my channel. I didnt think it would happen, it was totally a pipe dream I thought. I started too late afterall, it was already 2013, and there were so many bigger channels on youtube that there was no way I would get noticed. Well it turns out that wasnt true, and I did get noticed.
As for now, well I'm too busy making videos all the time to play the game as much as I use too. I still play a lot more than just logging in to raid, but no where near the levels of when I use to no-life the game.
Do I regret cutting all my friends out of my life to play wow after highschool? Yah a little bit. I do and I dont. For one, that was the best year of my life and I cant help but look back on that time with fondness.And I could have never had that year unlessI did what I did. And two, I could always just re-connect with them later on in life if I want, which I did do with a couple. But I also made so many new friends through wow and youtube that Its not really a big concern of mine. Plus highschool was like 6 or 7 years ago now(9 years now), so all of them are adults with jobs and kids and responsibilities. God I feel old.
Monday, December 17, 2018
Draw my life
Note - This is an abandoned script and done in notepad with no spell check. And I'm real bad at spelling.
Draw my life, hirumaredx.
I'm a bag fan of these kinds of videos and I they're pretty freakin easy to make. I mean, all you have to do is talk about yourself and draw stick figures and I already draw shitty picutres for half of my videos anyway. So without further adu,
actually I should probably warn you guys. I've told my life story to only a handful of people and they all think its pretty depressing so if your not in the mood to get bummed out you should probably just watch one of my other amazingly funny videos instead.
I was born on April 29th, 1992. I am currently 22 years old as of making this video. (lawl young boy -edited 1:40 PM 12/17/2018)
My childhood was pretty normal. Or at least I thought it was until I told other people about it.
In kindergarten I made a lot of friends and was a pretty outgoing child. In first grade I moved to a new school and made a whole bunch of new friends. Also I saw the first episode of Pokemon around this time. i still remember watching that shit on my 5 dollar tv in my room thinking it was the coolest shit ever.
In 2nd grade I moved to a new school again and made a whole bunch of new friends.
At the start of third grade there was this kid who sat in front of me that was way bigger and fatter than I was who started picking on me. Writing shit on my paper, stealing my pencils, the whole douchbag grade-school shabang. I didnt take this shit sitting down though, I'd steal his stupid pencils right back and rip his papers up. I was always one of the shorter kids in the class so he probably thought I was an easy target, so after a couple of days of this going down I talked to one of my friends in a different class and we organized a way to stop this little problem.
This kid was way bigger than me, so I was at a huge disadvantage in a fair fight. So me and my friend waited for Recess because this wanna be bully didnt have any friends and just sat by himself under a tree. So while he was sitting in the shade doing nothing we jumped him. And since it was 2 on one we easily won that little exchange.
Then after recess was over we went back to class and this kid made a 180. He was super nice as shit and wanted to be my friend. I was hesitant at first but he seemed sincere so that was that. I moved to a new school about a month after that.
New school, kinda bummed about having to make new friends but I make due. After a couple of months I make a ton of new friends and develop my first crush and this girl named A. Nothing to special happened about that. I would hang out with her and her friends from time to time at recess and she told me she liked me in my ear one day at lunch. I'd like to say that I told her I liked her too and we had whatever 3rd graders call a relationship, but I totally bitched out and just avoided her for the rest of the year instead.
Then in 4th grade my mom went into rehab for the first time and me and my 2 sisters moved in with my grandmother, and my 6 month old brother went to live with his grandmother from his dads side.
I should probably mention that my mom was a drug addict, and the reason I went to a new school every year was because we would go and move in with whoever her new boyfriend or drug dealer was. all of my siblings are from different dads and I've lived in more motels than I can remember. I remember once, I bought this bug catching kit from the dollar store and tried to catch all of the cock roaches in the apartment and I filled that bad boy up. I was so use to cock roach apartments that I didnt know most houses weren't filled with them. Of course I'd take cock roaches over having to sleep outside in front of a church any day.
You see, when my mom wasn't able to get a motel we just slept at the local church. not inside or anything, but like in the back of it on the concrete. Fun fact, if you ever find yourself homeless and need a place to sleep, churches are usually pretty good at letting you stay there.
Sleeping outside and in roach motels wasn't really a problem, the biggest thing was finding food to eat. You see, during the day my mom and whoever her boyfriend was would lock us out during the day and we werent allowed back inside until night. So I had to make due with getting my own food during the day, not that we ever had any in the motels anyway. One day when we got to eat ramen noodels was a fucking feast. since i couldnt rely on my mother for food I just went to the local convenience store and just stole stuff. This homeless guy showed me this trick, where you could put some hot dogs from the roller into a 32.oz cup, fill it with ice, and just walk out the door. They didnt charge for ice for some reason but it worked. also, since I knew if i was the only person in the store the clerk would be suspicious if he saw a little kid walking around the store for so long looking over his shoulder and just walking out.
So what I would do is walk up and down the sides of the roads until I found 5 cents. A nickle, 5 pennys, whatever it just had to be 5 cents. Then i'd walk in the store, slip stuff into my pockets with one hand while picking up items and looking at them intently with the other, go over to the cheap candy and grab one of the 5 cent ones and go up to the counter and buy it. I got away with it every single time and showed my sisters how to do it to because I hated sharing with them.
All in all I thought i had a pretty great childhood, I mean my mom let me go outside where ever I wanted during the day and i could do whatever i wanted. I had a pretty positive attitude about all of this back then. when one of my moms boyfriends was choking my mom and he was doing it a little longer than usual I just grabed one of his knifes and threaten to stab him in the neck if he didnt let go. He stopped and I went back to doing my thing after he hit me like nothing happened. one day a group of people that my mom had kicked out this house we were staying at came back and beat everyone with baseball bats. I was pissed because i was going to miss the new episode of dragon ball z that was suppose to start when it all went down. They were in the middle of the cell saga back then and if you watched dragon ball z back then you know how awesome that shit was. cell was the best villian ever at this point.
So yah, enough about that stuff, I moved in with my grandmother in 4th grade and that was pretty cool. I mean, i couldn't go out whenever i wanted anymore for as long as I wanted, but we had food everyday which was pretty nice. 4th grade was also when yugioh came out and i was all over that shit. But then when my mom came back to visit she decided that yugioh cards were of the devil and threw them all away, making me want to have them even more than ever. Now i should mention my moms not religious, she was just a druggie. Now a days I have my own yugioh youtbue channel as well as this one and its doing pretty well.
So anyway, the reason my mom was visiting was because she ran away from her rehab clinic and was getting ready to go to a new one. this new rehab place was made special for women and had this section for single mothers so me and my sisters moved into a rehab clinic in 5th grade.
Now that place was actually not half bad and I have nothing but found memories of that place because they had activities and gave us presents and it was pretty great actually.
The school i went to was at this church school were everyone in the grade was in 1 class. Our 5th grade class was the biggest in the school and was about the size of a regular classroom. that school was pretty fun, the work was super easy, I made a lot of friends and had a great time. Afterschool we were taken to a youth center until my mom got out of work that had pool tables, ping pong, and free arcade games. This was also the time beyblades came out and I had figured out how to add a second metal ring to my top which made it unbeatable at school. This kid traded me a gameboy advance for my unbeatable beyblade and I accepted, because gameboy advances where all the rage.
Anyways, after 5th grade ended my mom was able to leave re-hab and enter this program for poor single mothers, where they gave us a house, food boxes, special fun classes to go to afterschool, and a shit ton of presents for Christmas. Of course I had to go to a new school as well for 6th grade which made my 6th new school in 6 years. Now I had so much fun back in 5th grade that I was pretty bummed out about going to a new school, and this place was in an upper middle class area with kids who had been friends with each other their whole lives.
To be honest it was kind of a culture shock, these kids where so much different than the kids I'd known before. They were all so well behaved and valued education and reading. I had never read a whole book in my life at this point but everyone else in class where reading these huge ass chapter books with no pictures.
It had turned out that I was way behind in school because my last one didnt teach us anything, so I had to go to remedial classes for a few months. The teacher in that class was great and I learned more in those few months than I had all of the previous year. Now I've always been really good at with school work and won a pizza party in 4th grade for coming in second place at a math meet. (fucking 4 x 7).
So after getting out of the remedial class I went back to the regular classes and had yet to make a new friend, which was weird considering how easily I made friends before.
I thought all the kids at this new school were weird and just gave up on them, and instead just spent all my time at the swing set. I'm pretty fucking good at swinging with all the practice I got. Anyways, after about half a year I finally got over myself and tried to make friends again and had fun for the rest of 6th grade. Turns out he kids were pretty freaking nice, they were just all in their own groups already and weren't interested in reaching out to the new kid who never talks.
Then in 7th grade I moved up to the middle school. I didnt have any classes with the friends I made the year before and sat by myself at lunch like some kind of loser. I also got it into my head for some reason that I'd only talk to people who had watched dragonball Z. I'm not sure why, I got over myself in a couple of months and made some great friends though.
In my 2nd semester in 7th grade we moved to a new house in the program. Before they had given us a small town house but the program had a pretty nice house for us to live in so we moved far away. But the short bus from my middle school would drive all the way in the hell out to our house to pick me and my sister up and just assumed we'd do that again in 8th grade, but I was wrong.
Turns out there was another middle school really close to our house and i had to go there. This middle school, was located in the middle of a low income housing area and I just went from a higher middle class area to this school. The difference was like night and day. The work in 8th grade was 10 times easier than it was at my old school, and the kids were all super immature and could give two shits about school.
I remember on the first day at this new school, in 8th grade mind you, this kid made a fart noise with his mouth and the entire room erupted in laughter like it was the fucking funniest thing in the world.
I thought, "ok, this is pretty weird". Then 2 classes later, a different kid does the same thing with the same results. And eruption of laughter like he had just told the funniest joke in the world. It was then that i told myself "ok, I'm not going to associate with any of these kids" and I made zero friends in 8th grade. I talked to no one and know one tried talking to me. Going that long without talking to anyone and having no friends, i developed some social anxiety and became shy. I remember by the end of the year, wanting to talk to people but I just couldn't. there was this other kid at lunch who sat by himself that I saw everyday, and I sat close to him. I wanted to talk to him so bad just so i could have a friend but, but no matter what I did, what mental tricks i put myself through I could never bring myself to start a conversation with him. And tried a ton of times before school let out but i just couldnt do it. Being shy sucks and I dont recommend it to anyone.
Anyways 9th grade comes around and I signed up for football. In 7th grade the program I was in would pay for any sport i wanted and my mom signed me up for football and I was pretty good at it. Our coach said that if we had the chance, we should sign up for our schools team when we could and I just kinda decided to go for it. I also took a weight lifting class in 8th grade so I was fit enough.
A shy nerd playing football, what could go wrong right? well it turns out I was really really good because I had better reactions than everyone. When I played, my body would move on its own and it always did the right thing. Playing on pure reflexes is actually pretty damn effective in football. I wasnt the fastest, or strongest player on the team, but I was without a doubt the best player on the team because no one could beat me in drills and I got more sacks and tackles in games than everyone else on the team combined. There was one game where the other team started triple teaming me and completely shut down our defense, so our coachs strategy for beating that was to send one of the line backers in to take one of the guys off of me, because I could deal with a double team no problem.
Now let me tell you what happens when you become the best player on your schools football team, because 9th grade where I lived was still middleschool. You make a lot of friends whether you want to or not. There is no keeping to yourself anymore, because everyone is trying to be your best friend. Going from no one talking to me for a year, to everyone wanting to be my friends was a little jarring at first. Now I was still shy as shit but I was starting to come out of my shell. In 9th grade i was moved into all advance classes, because I kept getting a 100% on all my tests and the kids in the advance classes where so much more my type.
In advance algebra this guy who sat next to me looked like your stereotypical pot head, but had a mind like a calculator. I'd never seen a real genius before I met this kid. Since we both always got 100% on our tests we raced to see who could finish their test first. Since the dude had a brain like a calculator he always won, but I got close sometimes. So anyway I made a lot of friends and had a great time until the end of the year.
9th grade for me was around the time that myspace was all the rage and we got a new computer and I had all these people who wanted to add me to myspace so I made an account.
Now i'd get random messages from people I'd never met before all the time because of my football popularity but this one girl kept messaging me eveyday. She could keep the conversation going no matter what the hell it was and I literally talked about nothing. My social skills at this time where poor as shit but she acted like I was the funniest, most interesting person in the world and I fell for her hard.
She wasnt in any of my classes so we decided to meet up afterschool and she was way cuter than her picture and I was totally on cloud 9. Anyways, after being friends for 6-8 months she stopped talking to me one day out of the blue and blocked me on myspace. I had made some other really cool lady freinds before i met her and she did not like any of them and told me to stop talking to them. So i did like a little bitch, but one of these girls made a public comment on my myspace page, or however wall posts worked in myspace. she saw and super over reacted by removing me from her life.
Seeing as I was super in love with this girl and in the middle of puberty, where your emotions are stronger than they will ever be, I took it pretty damn hard.
About 2 weeks after said girl stopped talking to me, a good friend of mine tried to kill himself after being rejected by a girl he liked. I went and visited him in the hospital and he was not playing around, or doing it for attention. I'm not sure how he survived to be honest, but I hate to say it but that event helped me a little. I decided to do something about this crippling depression so i wouldn't go down the same path he did and learned how to turn off my emotions with lots of practice.
now the trick to turning off your emotions is actually pretty easy, it follows the same principal as saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning. What i did was focus on the emotion intensely whenever i felt anything, sad, happy, it didnt matter because I needed practice. I would focus on it, and internalize it like "so this is sad. I can feel it in my stomach. If I stand still I can feel it. So this is the emotion." After doing that for a few minutes the emotion just goes away. It wasnt until college that i realized this is called internationalization, a way to cope with stress.
Anyway after a while I didnt need to consciously intellectualize my emotions anymore because I did it automatically from doing it all the time and entered 10th grade with no emotions.
Now let me tell you what living a year with no emotions is like. School work was super easy, i've never been able to concentrate so intently on work in my whole life. I still had friends from middle school, and just latched onto them and didnt talk much. In my football JV team I was no longer the best player on the team, but i was still one of the best and got the nick name Serial Killer because I never talked to anyone or celebrated after getting sacks and tackles in games like everyone else. That year was, I dont know how to describe it. It wasnt bad, but it wasnt good either. It was so so. Interesting to say the least. It also killed my joy of watching the show dexter, because for someone whos suppose to not have emotion he sure does show a lot of fucking emotion.
But anyway, the summer before 11th grade I turned 16 and my mom made me get a job and working in customer service all summer pulled me out of that trance.
(End of script, probably got tired of typing for the day and just never finished it upon a re-read)
Draw my life, hirumaredx.
I'm a bag fan of these kinds of videos and I they're pretty freakin easy to make. I mean, all you have to do is talk about yourself and draw stick figures and I already draw shitty picutres for half of my videos anyway. So without further adu,
actually I should probably warn you guys. I've told my life story to only a handful of people and they all think its pretty depressing so if your not in the mood to get bummed out you should probably just watch one of my other amazingly funny videos instead.
I was born on April 29th, 1992. I am currently 22 years old as of making this video. (lawl young boy -edited 1:40 PM 12/17/2018)
My childhood was pretty normal. Or at least I thought it was until I told other people about it.
In kindergarten I made a lot of friends and was a pretty outgoing child. In first grade I moved to a new school and made a whole bunch of new friends. Also I saw the first episode of Pokemon around this time. i still remember watching that shit on my 5 dollar tv in my room thinking it was the coolest shit ever.
In 2nd grade I moved to a new school again and made a whole bunch of new friends.
At the start of third grade there was this kid who sat in front of me that was way bigger and fatter than I was who started picking on me. Writing shit on my paper, stealing my pencils, the whole douchbag grade-school shabang. I didnt take this shit sitting down though, I'd steal his stupid pencils right back and rip his papers up. I was always one of the shorter kids in the class so he probably thought I was an easy target, so after a couple of days of this going down I talked to one of my friends in a different class and we organized a way to stop this little problem.
This kid was way bigger than me, so I was at a huge disadvantage in a fair fight. So me and my friend waited for Recess because this wanna be bully didnt have any friends and just sat by himself under a tree. So while he was sitting in the shade doing nothing we jumped him. And since it was 2 on one we easily won that little exchange.
Then after recess was over we went back to class and this kid made a 180. He was super nice as shit and wanted to be my friend. I was hesitant at first but he seemed sincere so that was that. I moved to a new school about a month after that.
New school, kinda bummed about having to make new friends but I make due. After a couple of months I make a ton of new friends and develop my first crush and this girl named A. Nothing to special happened about that. I would hang out with her and her friends from time to time at recess and she told me she liked me in my ear one day at lunch. I'd like to say that I told her I liked her too and we had whatever 3rd graders call a relationship, but I totally bitched out and just avoided her for the rest of the year instead.
Then in 4th grade my mom went into rehab for the first time and me and my 2 sisters moved in with my grandmother, and my 6 month old brother went to live with his grandmother from his dads side.
I should probably mention that my mom was a drug addict, and the reason I went to a new school every year was because we would go and move in with whoever her new boyfriend or drug dealer was. all of my siblings are from different dads and I've lived in more motels than I can remember. I remember once, I bought this bug catching kit from the dollar store and tried to catch all of the cock roaches in the apartment and I filled that bad boy up. I was so use to cock roach apartments that I didnt know most houses weren't filled with them. Of course I'd take cock roaches over having to sleep outside in front of a church any day.
You see, when my mom wasn't able to get a motel we just slept at the local church. not inside or anything, but like in the back of it on the concrete. Fun fact, if you ever find yourself homeless and need a place to sleep, churches are usually pretty good at letting you stay there.
Sleeping outside and in roach motels wasn't really a problem, the biggest thing was finding food to eat. You see, during the day my mom and whoever her boyfriend was would lock us out during the day and we werent allowed back inside until night. So I had to make due with getting my own food during the day, not that we ever had any in the motels anyway. One day when we got to eat ramen noodels was a fucking feast. since i couldnt rely on my mother for food I just went to the local convenience store and just stole stuff. This homeless guy showed me this trick, where you could put some hot dogs from the roller into a 32.oz cup, fill it with ice, and just walk out the door. They didnt charge for ice for some reason but it worked. also, since I knew if i was the only person in the store the clerk would be suspicious if he saw a little kid walking around the store for so long looking over his shoulder and just walking out.
So what I would do is walk up and down the sides of the roads until I found 5 cents. A nickle, 5 pennys, whatever it just had to be 5 cents. Then i'd walk in the store, slip stuff into my pockets with one hand while picking up items and looking at them intently with the other, go over to the cheap candy and grab one of the 5 cent ones and go up to the counter and buy it. I got away with it every single time and showed my sisters how to do it to because I hated sharing with them.
All in all I thought i had a pretty great childhood, I mean my mom let me go outside where ever I wanted during the day and i could do whatever i wanted. I had a pretty positive attitude about all of this back then. when one of my moms boyfriends was choking my mom and he was doing it a little longer than usual I just grabed one of his knifes and threaten to stab him in the neck if he didnt let go. He stopped and I went back to doing my thing after he hit me like nothing happened. one day a group of people that my mom had kicked out this house we were staying at came back and beat everyone with baseball bats. I was pissed because i was going to miss the new episode of dragon ball z that was suppose to start when it all went down. They were in the middle of the cell saga back then and if you watched dragon ball z back then you know how awesome that shit was. cell was the best villian ever at this point.
So yah, enough about that stuff, I moved in with my grandmother in 4th grade and that was pretty cool. I mean, i couldn't go out whenever i wanted anymore for as long as I wanted, but we had food everyday which was pretty nice. 4th grade was also when yugioh came out and i was all over that shit. But then when my mom came back to visit she decided that yugioh cards were of the devil and threw them all away, making me want to have them even more than ever. Now i should mention my moms not religious, she was just a druggie. Now a days I have my own yugioh youtbue channel as well as this one and its doing pretty well.
So anyway, the reason my mom was visiting was because she ran away from her rehab clinic and was getting ready to go to a new one. this new rehab place was made special for women and had this section for single mothers so me and my sisters moved into a rehab clinic in 5th grade.
Now that place was actually not half bad and I have nothing but found memories of that place because they had activities and gave us presents and it was pretty great actually.
The school i went to was at this church school were everyone in the grade was in 1 class. Our 5th grade class was the biggest in the school and was about the size of a regular classroom. that school was pretty fun, the work was super easy, I made a lot of friends and had a great time. Afterschool we were taken to a youth center until my mom got out of work that had pool tables, ping pong, and free arcade games. This was also the time beyblades came out and I had figured out how to add a second metal ring to my top which made it unbeatable at school. This kid traded me a gameboy advance for my unbeatable beyblade and I accepted, because gameboy advances where all the rage.
Anyways, after 5th grade ended my mom was able to leave re-hab and enter this program for poor single mothers, where they gave us a house, food boxes, special fun classes to go to afterschool, and a shit ton of presents for Christmas. Of course I had to go to a new school as well for 6th grade which made my 6th new school in 6 years. Now I had so much fun back in 5th grade that I was pretty bummed out about going to a new school, and this place was in an upper middle class area with kids who had been friends with each other their whole lives.
To be honest it was kind of a culture shock, these kids where so much different than the kids I'd known before. They were all so well behaved and valued education and reading. I had never read a whole book in my life at this point but everyone else in class where reading these huge ass chapter books with no pictures.
It had turned out that I was way behind in school because my last one didnt teach us anything, so I had to go to remedial classes for a few months. The teacher in that class was great and I learned more in those few months than I had all of the previous year. Now I've always been really good at with school work and won a pizza party in 4th grade for coming in second place at a math meet. (fucking 4 x 7).
So after getting out of the remedial class I went back to the regular classes and had yet to make a new friend, which was weird considering how easily I made friends before.
I thought all the kids at this new school were weird and just gave up on them, and instead just spent all my time at the swing set. I'm pretty fucking good at swinging with all the practice I got. Anyways, after about half a year I finally got over myself and tried to make friends again and had fun for the rest of 6th grade. Turns out he kids were pretty freaking nice, they were just all in their own groups already and weren't interested in reaching out to the new kid who never talks.
Then in 7th grade I moved up to the middle school. I didnt have any classes with the friends I made the year before and sat by myself at lunch like some kind of loser. I also got it into my head for some reason that I'd only talk to people who had watched dragonball Z. I'm not sure why, I got over myself in a couple of months and made some great friends though.
In my 2nd semester in 7th grade we moved to a new house in the program. Before they had given us a small town house but the program had a pretty nice house for us to live in so we moved far away. But the short bus from my middle school would drive all the way in the hell out to our house to pick me and my sister up and just assumed we'd do that again in 8th grade, but I was wrong.
Turns out there was another middle school really close to our house and i had to go there. This middle school, was located in the middle of a low income housing area and I just went from a higher middle class area to this school. The difference was like night and day. The work in 8th grade was 10 times easier than it was at my old school, and the kids were all super immature and could give two shits about school.
I remember on the first day at this new school, in 8th grade mind you, this kid made a fart noise with his mouth and the entire room erupted in laughter like it was the fucking funniest thing in the world.
I thought, "ok, this is pretty weird". Then 2 classes later, a different kid does the same thing with the same results. And eruption of laughter like he had just told the funniest joke in the world. It was then that i told myself "ok, I'm not going to associate with any of these kids" and I made zero friends in 8th grade. I talked to no one and know one tried talking to me. Going that long without talking to anyone and having no friends, i developed some social anxiety and became shy. I remember by the end of the year, wanting to talk to people but I just couldn't. there was this other kid at lunch who sat by himself that I saw everyday, and I sat close to him. I wanted to talk to him so bad just so i could have a friend but, but no matter what I did, what mental tricks i put myself through I could never bring myself to start a conversation with him. And tried a ton of times before school let out but i just couldnt do it. Being shy sucks and I dont recommend it to anyone.
Anyways 9th grade comes around and I signed up for football. In 7th grade the program I was in would pay for any sport i wanted and my mom signed me up for football and I was pretty good at it. Our coach said that if we had the chance, we should sign up for our schools team when we could and I just kinda decided to go for it. I also took a weight lifting class in 8th grade so I was fit enough.
A shy nerd playing football, what could go wrong right? well it turns out I was really really good because I had better reactions than everyone. When I played, my body would move on its own and it always did the right thing. Playing on pure reflexes is actually pretty damn effective in football. I wasnt the fastest, or strongest player on the team, but I was without a doubt the best player on the team because no one could beat me in drills and I got more sacks and tackles in games than everyone else on the team combined. There was one game where the other team started triple teaming me and completely shut down our defense, so our coachs strategy for beating that was to send one of the line backers in to take one of the guys off of me, because I could deal with a double team no problem.
Now let me tell you what happens when you become the best player on your schools football team, because 9th grade where I lived was still middleschool. You make a lot of friends whether you want to or not. There is no keeping to yourself anymore, because everyone is trying to be your best friend. Going from no one talking to me for a year, to everyone wanting to be my friends was a little jarring at first. Now I was still shy as shit but I was starting to come out of my shell. In 9th grade i was moved into all advance classes, because I kept getting a 100% on all my tests and the kids in the advance classes where so much more my type.
In advance algebra this guy who sat next to me looked like your stereotypical pot head, but had a mind like a calculator. I'd never seen a real genius before I met this kid. Since we both always got 100% on our tests we raced to see who could finish their test first. Since the dude had a brain like a calculator he always won, but I got close sometimes. So anyway I made a lot of friends and had a great time until the end of the year.
9th grade for me was around the time that myspace was all the rage and we got a new computer and I had all these people who wanted to add me to myspace so I made an account.
Now i'd get random messages from people I'd never met before all the time because of my football popularity but this one girl kept messaging me eveyday. She could keep the conversation going no matter what the hell it was and I literally talked about nothing. My social skills at this time where poor as shit but she acted like I was the funniest, most interesting person in the world and I fell for her hard.
She wasnt in any of my classes so we decided to meet up afterschool and she was way cuter than her picture and I was totally on cloud 9. Anyways, after being friends for 6-8 months she stopped talking to me one day out of the blue and blocked me on myspace. I had made some other really cool lady freinds before i met her and she did not like any of them and told me to stop talking to them. So i did like a little bitch, but one of these girls made a public comment on my myspace page, or however wall posts worked in myspace. she saw and super over reacted by removing me from her life.
Seeing as I was super in love with this girl and in the middle of puberty, where your emotions are stronger than they will ever be, I took it pretty damn hard.
About 2 weeks after said girl stopped talking to me, a good friend of mine tried to kill himself after being rejected by a girl he liked. I went and visited him in the hospital and he was not playing around, or doing it for attention. I'm not sure how he survived to be honest, but I hate to say it but that event helped me a little. I decided to do something about this crippling depression so i wouldn't go down the same path he did and learned how to turn off my emotions with lots of practice.
now the trick to turning off your emotions is actually pretty easy, it follows the same principal as saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning. What i did was focus on the emotion intensely whenever i felt anything, sad, happy, it didnt matter because I needed practice. I would focus on it, and internalize it like "so this is sad. I can feel it in my stomach. If I stand still I can feel it. So this is the emotion." After doing that for a few minutes the emotion just goes away. It wasnt until college that i realized this is called internationalization, a way to cope with stress.
Anyway after a while I didnt need to consciously intellectualize my emotions anymore because I did it automatically from doing it all the time and entered 10th grade with no emotions.
Now let me tell you what living a year with no emotions is like. School work was super easy, i've never been able to concentrate so intently on work in my whole life. I still had friends from middle school, and just latched onto them and didnt talk much. In my football JV team I was no longer the best player on the team, but i was still one of the best and got the nick name Serial Killer because I never talked to anyone or celebrated after getting sacks and tackles in games like everyone else. That year was, I dont know how to describe it. It wasnt bad, but it wasnt good either. It was so so. Interesting to say the least. It also killed my joy of watching the show dexter, because for someone whos suppose to not have emotion he sure does show a lot of fucking emotion.
But anyway, the summer before 11th grade I turned 16 and my mom made me get a job and working in customer service all summer pulled me out of that trance.
(End of script, probably got tired of typing for the day and just never finished it upon a re-read)
Monday, December 10, 2018
The Problem with Saurfang
Note - This is an abandoned script and done in notepad with no spell check. And I'm real bad at spelling.
The Problem with Saurfang
The preface this video, I should say that I am personally a big fan of Saurfang. Hes one of the few Horde leaders in game that both Alliance and Horde memebers like both in Lore and with the general WoW player base. But there in lies his problem to an extent. Suarfang believes in his orcish honor and will never do anything to forsake it. Which sure, thats a great character trait for him to have. But because of this character trait of his, blizzard is kind of forcing this ideal that anything he does is right.
Lets take Sylvanas for Example. Many people disagree with her actions for obvious reasons. Shes a no nonsense forsaken willing to do dirty things to win. And Win she does, shes probably one of the most successful leaders when it comes to battles won or victories denied. When she first broke free from Arthas' control, she nearly killed him before Kel'thuzad came in and saved the day. And afterwards she only had a handful of followers and the 3 dreadlords who controlled arthas and the rest of her scourage as her enemies. So she one by one defeats all 3 dreadlords, gets one of them to turn to her side, and takes Lorderon for herself and builds a kingdom.
During catacyslm when Garrosh orders her to take Gilneas she successfully captures the city despte them reciveing aid at the last second.
She successfully takes teldrasil where garrosh failed in Ashenvale before ever getting close.
And even when the Alliance tried to attack Undercity in retaliation she would have won the battle at the front gate when she used the plague if it wasnt for Jiana single handely turning the tide of the battle in the Alliances favor. And even then she was still able to ultimatley deny them of a victory and would have killed the leader of the Alliance in another trap if it wasnt again, for Jiana being there to bail them out.
She may have done a lot of morally questionable things to achieve her victories, but her results are there to see.
Theres a reason shes a fan favorite character. Shes intresting, gets results, and is proactive in her story rather than reactive. Thats why a compelling villain is intresting to watch. A villain by thier very nature is trying to bring change to the world and requires a very proactive effort in order to bring about that change. Which opens up lots of character moments as they go out into the world and try to get things done. Where as a hero can only ever react to bad things happening and is more limited in scope. Not to say Sylvanas is entirely a villain though, shes pretty justified in her distrust of the alliance. A point even Saurfang had to agree with her on.
When she first became a forsaken and sent out her people to try and get in contact with the Alliance, all of them were hunted down and killed. The Alliance had no intrest in forming allies with the forsaken, despite many of them, if not all of them being part of it before the plague. And to add to that, the Alliance officially hunted them down with the knights of the Silverhand, until eventually that group turned into the scarlet crusade and the Alliance kind of distances themselvs from them. Not 100% though, the Alliance was still on ok terms with the Scarelt crusade even in vanilla.
The intentions of the Alliance is understandable. They thought the forsaken where monsters just like the scourage, they didnt know any better and didnt try to know any better until BfA. Even Tyraleon, the beacon of light of the Alliance tried to strike down Alonus Foul the moment he saw him despite Foul being the kindest soul you'd ever meet and also being his mentor in his past life. So while the Alliances intentions on the matter may be understandable, thier actions towards the matter where not. And Sylvanas judges the allliance based on thier actions, not thier intentions. As she should.
And its not just the forsaken. The Alliance have done simular things to the Blood elves too. After the scourge decimated thier homeland, Keal;thas tried his best to reach out to the Alliance and re-join, only to be sent on suicide missions by the alliance general he was under, and eventually setenced to death. He had no choice but to ally with Illidan and his naga, because at least they werent actively trying to kill him. Then later on, when lorthemar lost contact with Kael'thas, Sylvanas apporached him and offered the horde as potential allies, and they accepted as they were going to need the help for a multitude of reasons, with 1 of them being finding out what happened to thier leader Kael'thas. But then many years later the immediate need of the horde wasnt really an issue for them anymore, and Garrosh was being a huge jerk to everyone so the Blood Elves thought to try and negociate with the Alliance for a 2nd time, only for Jiana to go on a genocide in Dalaran, killing, exileing, and imprisoning all the blood elfs in the city. So instead of going to the Alliance to get away from garrosh, they instead joined Vol'jins rebelleon to take him down and reform.
And then again after the broken isles, despite there being rumors about that the horde retreated from the borken shore for legitamte reasons, Gen Greymane defying orders decides to attack the horde in retaliation and starts a war with the forsaken in Stormhiem. And what doesn anduin do with the information of this unprovoked attack? Nothing. He just brushes it under the rug and pretends it never happened. Gen is still his most trusted advisor nd reiceves no punishment, which is the same as endorsing the attack.
All this to say, Sylvanas is entirely justified in her war against the alliance. There are real world countries and cultures in the real world that still hold grudges over things that happened to them hundreds, and somteims thousands of years ago by a group of people. I'm not going to list any examples because I'd rather not bring real world politics into this, but there are literally a ton of examples I could have used. And the bad things the Alliace have done to the forsaken arent even that long ago. And one of the go-to arguments I hear against Sylvanas is that the alliance is willing to make peace now, so shes just being a warmongerer for the sake of it. When really, shes entirely justified in her reasoning, a fact even Saurfang agreeded with. So how does this all relate to saurfang?
Well,Saurfang went along with Sylvanas plan until she decided to burn the tree. He was fine with killing malfurion to destroy the hope of the nightelves, but then pulled out at the last second because he did an dishonable blow. Which sure, whatever, kind of a lame reasoning, but thats fine. Warcraft lore is full of minor hiccups like that but I wouldnt write a whole video about that. Sylvanas then burns the tree killing most of the cilvilians in it and this understandably upsets Saurfang, and reminds him how far Sylvanas is willing to go. Waging war on the nightelvs and killing thier major leaders is honorable war to him, but what sylvans did was going too far, which again, understandable. Even real world wars have rules about whats going too far.
Then in the battle for undercity, Saurfang chooses to fight the allianceby himself in basically a suicide attack. Not something sylvanas forced him to do, just something he decided on his own and Sylvanas was like "yah sure whatever, I'm not gonna stop you" To which even Baine had to agree with. He didnt like what happened, but he couldnt fault Sylvanas for Saurfangs own choice. So then the Alliance take him captive instead of killing him and take him to his holding cell.
During the extraction scenario, Horde players meet up with Saurfang in prison and offer him a chance to exscape, with him telling the horde players that no, hes done with Sylvanas horde and wont be returning. While this inst exactly treason in of itself, the fact that hes a horde leader with all the intel that a leader of his stature would have, along with the fact that sylvanas spies know hes willingly talking to the Alliance, could very well be lossly defined as treason. Afterall, wars are won on information.
Then in the upcoming patch, Saurfang manges to escape from prison, with the narritive hinting that the leader of the SI7 agents of Stormwind mithias Shaw helping him out with it. And your tasked with finding him and returning him to the horde. When you meet up with Suarfang, the forsaken that came along with you give Saurfang a choice, come with them, or die for treason. And here in lies the problem with Saurfang, he does choose to fight, and you as a player are forced to help him out. Only, the narritive of the story paints this as a positive thing, as if your obviously suppose to help him out. When really, Saurfang made the choice to leave on his own. He made the choice to not go to Orgrimar and talk to Sylvanas, because he knew he commited treason. And we're suppose to help him out secrelty as if thats the right thing to do.
No, thats not ok. Sylvanas is not the bad guy in this situation, but its obviously trying to paint her in a bad light, and paint Saurfang as if hes in the right.
The Problem with Saurfang
The preface this video, I should say that I am personally a big fan of Saurfang. Hes one of the few Horde leaders in game that both Alliance and Horde memebers like both in Lore and with the general WoW player base. But there in lies his problem to an extent. Suarfang believes in his orcish honor and will never do anything to forsake it. Which sure, thats a great character trait for him to have. But because of this character trait of his, blizzard is kind of forcing this ideal that anything he does is right.
Lets take Sylvanas for Example. Many people disagree with her actions for obvious reasons. Shes a no nonsense forsaken willing to do dirty things to win. And Win she does, shes probably one of the most successful leaders when it comes to battles won or victories denied. When she first broke free from Arthas' control, she nearly killed him before Kel'thuzad came in and saved the day. And afterwards she only had a handful of followers and the 3 dreadlords who controlled arthas and the rest of her scourage as her enemies. So she one by one defeats all 3 dreadlords, gets one of them to turn to her side, and takes Lorderon for herself and builds a kingdom.
During catacyslm when Garrosh orders her to take Gilneas she successfully captures the city despte them reciveing aid at the last second.
She successfully takes teldrasil where garrosh failed in Ashenvale before ever getting close.
And even when the Alliance tried to attack Undercity in retaliation she would have won the battle at the front gate when she used the plague if it wasnt for Jiana single handely turning the tide of the battle in the Alliances favor. And even then she was still able to ultimatley deny them of a victory and would have killed the leader of the Alliance in another trap if it wasnt again, for Jiana being there to bail them out.
She may have done a lot of morally questionable things to achieve her victories, but her results are there to see.
Theres a reason shes a fan favorite character. Shes intresting, gets results, and is proactive in her story rather than reactive. Thats why a compelling villain is intresting to watch. A villain by thier very nature is trying to bring change to the world and requires a very proactive effort in order to bring about that change. Which opens up lots of character moments as they go out into the world and try to get things done. Where as a hero can only ever react to bad things happening and is more limited in scope. Not to say Sylvanas is entirely a villain though, shes pretty justified in her distrust of the alliance. A point even Saurfang had to agree with her on.
When she first became a forsaken and sent out her people to try and get in contact with the Alliance, all of them were hunted down and killed. The Alliance had no intrest in forming allies with the forsaken, despite many of them, if not all of them being part of it before the plague. And to add to that, the Alliance officially hunted them down with the knights of the Silverhand, until eventually that group turned into the scarlet crusade and the Alliance kind of distances themselvs from them. Not 100% though, the Alliance was still on ok terms with the Scarelt crusade even in vanilla.
The intentions of the Alliance is understandable. They thought the forsaken where monsters just like the scourage, they didnt know any better and didnt try to know any better until BfA. Even Tyraleon, the beacon of light of the Alliance tried to strike down Alonus Foul the moment he saw him despite Foul being the kindest soul you'd ever meet and also being his mentor in his past life. So while the Alliances intentions on the matter may be understandable, thier actions towards the matter where not. And Sylvanas judges the allliance based on thier actions, not thier intentions. As she should.
And its not just the forsaken. The Alliance have done simular things to the Blood elves too. After the scourge decimated thier homeland, Keal;thas tried his best to reach out to the Alliance and re-join, only to be sent on suicide missions by the alliance general he was under, and eventually setenced to death. He had no choice but to ally with Illidan and his naga, because at least they werent actively trying to kill him. Then later on, when lorthemar lost contact with Kael'thas, Sylvanas apporached him and offered the horde as potential allies, and they accepted as they were going to need the help for a multitude of reasons, with 1 of them being finding out what happened to thier leader Kael'thas. But then many years later the immediate need of the horde wasnt really an issue for them anymore, and Garrosh was being a huge jerk to everyone so the Blood Elves thought to try and negociate with the Alliance for a 2nd time, only for Jiana to go on a genocide in Dalaran, killing, exileing, and imprisoning all the blood elfs in the city. So instead of going to the Alliance to get away from garrosh, they instead joined Vol'jins rebelleon to take him down and reform.
And then again after the broken isles, despite there being rumors about that the horde retreated from the borken shore for legitamte reasons, Gen Greymane defying orders decides to attack the horde in retaliation and starts a war with the forsaken in Stormhiem. And what doesn anduin do with the information of this unprovoked attack? Nothing. He just brushes it under the rug and pretends it never happened. Gen is still his most trusted advisor nd reiceves no punishment, which is the same as endorsing the attack.
All this to say, Sylvanas is entirely justified in her war against the alliance. There are real world countries and cultures in the real world that still hold grudges over things that happened to them hundreds, and somteims thousands of years ago by a group of people. I'm not going to list any examples because I'd rather not bring real world politics into this, but there are literally a ton of examples I could have used. And the bad things the Alliace have done to the forsaken arent even that long ago. And one of the go-to arguments I hear against Sylvanas is that the alliance is willing to make peace now, so shes just being a warmongerer for the sake of it. When really, shes entirely justified in her reasoning, a fact even Saurfang agreeded with. So how does this all relate to saurfang?
Well,Saurfang went along with Sylvanas plan until she decided to burn the tree. He was fine with killing malfurion to destroy the hope of the nightelves, but then pulled out at the last second because he did an dishonable blow. Which sure, whatever, kind of a lame reasoning, but thats fine. Warcraft lore is full of minor hiccups like that but I wouldnt write a whole video about that. Sylvanas then burns the tree killing most of the cilvilians in it and this understandably upsets Saurfang, and reminds him how far Sylvanas is willing to go. Waging war on the nightelvs and killing thier major leaders is honorable war to him, but what sylvans did was going too far, which again, understandable. Even real world wars have rules about whats going too far.
Then in the battle for undercity, Saurfang chooses to fight the allianceby himself in basically a suicide attack. Not something sylvanas forced him to do, just something he decided on his own and Sylvanas was like "yah sure whatever, I'm not gonna stop you" To which even Baine had to agree with. He didnt like what happened, but he couldnt fault Sylvanas for Saurfangs own choice. So then the Alliance take him captive instead of killing him and take him to his holding cell.
During the extraction scenario, Horde players meet up with Saurfang in prison and offer him a chance to exscape, with him telling the horde players that no, hes done with Sylvanas horde and wont be returning. While this inst exactly treason in of itself, the fact that hes a horde leader with all the intel that a leader of his stature would have, along with the fact that sylvanas spies know hes willingly talking to the Alliance, could very well be lossly defined as treason. Afterall, wars are won on information.
Then in the upcoming patch, Saurfang manges to escape from prison, with the narritive hinting that the leader of the SI7 agents of Stormwind mithias Shaw helping him out with it. And your tasked with finding him and returning him to the horde. When you meet up with Suarfang, the forsaken that came along with you give Saurfang a choice, come with them, or die for treason. And here in lies the problem with Saurfang, he does choose to fight, and you as a player are forced to help him out. Only, the narritive of the story paints this as a positive thing, as if your obviously suppose to help him out. When really, Saurfang made the choice to leave on his own. He made the choice to not go to Orgrimar and talk to Sylvanas, because he knew he commited treason. And we're suppose to help him out secrelty as if thats the right thing to do.
No, thats not ok. Sylvanas is not the bad guy in this situation, but its obviously trying to paint her in a bad light, and paint Saurfang as if hes in the right.
Monday, December 3, 2018
Classic WoW Gatekeeping and Making Mountains out of Molehills
Note - This is an abandoned script and done in notepad with no spell check.
Classic WoW Gatekeeping and Making Mountains out of Molehills
-Topics to address
-Classic wow should be experienced in 1 certain way
-Complaints about classic based on this assumption.
-Loot trading
-Shading in starting zones
-Make sure to add disclaimers
-Negative fallacy
-Complaining in of itself isnt bad. In fact its needed to an extent, otherwise nothing will change. The problem is compling a coupious amount over small things, and making them seem like bigger problems than they really are.
I should start off this video with a few things. For 1, I am excited about the classic wow servers, and as someone who has made a ton of videos on vanilla wow and earlier parts of wow, in fact wanting to learn about how the game was before I started playing was a big part in why I wanted to start making videos in the first place. So I am very intrested in Classic wow servers and the sucess of its launch. However, the community around classic wow has a few major problems that I hope to adress in this video.
The 2 biggest things I've noticed, is a rampant amount of Gatekeeping, and making mountains out of Molehills with every change. And I think those 2 points are intermingled a bit.
So first off, what is gatekeeping? Gatekeeping is when someone takes it upon themselvs to deiced if other people are allowed to have acess or rights to a community or identity.
Take this example from Urban dictionary
"Oh man, I love Harry Potter. I am such a geek!"
"Hardly. Talk to me when you're into theoretical physics."
In this example, speaker number 2 is gatekeeping the term "geek" and person 1 cant possibly be a geek from merely enjoying harry potter. They need to be into hard science as well. And the most common use of gatekeeping in the classic wow community, is that if you did not physically play wow in vanilla, you are not allowed to have opinions on classic wow, or your opinions dont matter.
And here are the common examples of gatekeeping I see when it comes to the classic wow community.In order to have the correct opinion of vanilla wow, you need to have..
-Played in vanilla wow when it was current
-Enjoy grinding
-Enjoy the community aspect and or Enjoy grouping up to accomplish goals
And if you dont share all 3 points, then your not a true classic wow fan.
Now before I go more into this topic, a little side note. So instead of trying to edit this video to only fit my narrative, I'll be showing both sides of all these arguments to give a little bit of nuance to these statements.
That being said, there is some merit to these gatekeeping points. If you played vanilla wow when it was current, your more likely to know more about how the game was played in that area and will probably have more credence to your statements than someone who did not.
If you dont enjoy grinding or at least tollerate it, your not going to like vanilla wow as that is what 90% of the game is.
And if you dont enjoy the sense of sommunity or grouping up to accomplish goals, your not going to be able to raid or pvp at the highest levels and have a hard time with certain quests.
So it only seems logical that a classic wow fan should share all 3 points. Except for the fact that people can look forward to classic wow no matter what. If you didnt play in vanilla, its fine to want to see what it was like. Hell lots of people who play private servers pretend they played in vanilla anyway so its not easy to figure out who really played vanilla or not. It shouldnt be the be all and end all point of having an opionion on how classic wow functions
If you dont like grinding, your probably going to quit classic wow really fast. I cant help but agree with the gatekeepers on this point.
If you dont enjoy the community aspect or grouping up, well good news! Vanilla wow has tons to do for solo players, its just going to be a little difficult. And at max level if you want to progress, your going to have to interact with people, you dont have a choice in the matter. But heres a thing about wow that a lot of people who gatekeep this 3rd point refuse to admit. WoW is a fun single player game. They will vehemently defend this point, and say if you dont enjoy the community aspect your shouldnt play an mmo and try another game. But at the same time, wow is just a strait up good single player game to some people. And the gatekeeping for this argument is nasty. The gatekeepers on this topic hate it if you call wow a good single player game, and will cite the genre of game wow is as some kind of magic be all and end all point to the matter, that wow is a massively multiplayer online game, and you cant play a multiplay game by yourseld. And you know what? You sure can, and lots of people enjoy doing it. They just dont speak up very much because this topic is gatekept so hard core. And I can see why, if they start to admit that wow has lots of single player content, they might think blizzard will put more effort into making the game more single player friendly and kill the community aspect, which is kind of what they did do to the game to an extent.
See? presenting both sides of the argument even if it goes against my narrtive. Something I do not see if the many negative videos I see on classic wow being thrown around youtube. Which kind of goes into my 2nd point. People making mountains out of molehills.
Now this sint something unique to classic wow, pretty much all video game communities fall into this trap in some way or another. And once the majority of videos and posts made about something is negative, saying anything positive is met with backlash. Theres this unique problem with human psychology, where we are hard wired to remember negative things more strongly than positive. If someone is rude to you at the bus station, your more likely to remember that a week later, rather than 99% of people who were pleasant to you, or the person who help you pick up your ticket after you dropped it. Because people being nice or at least indifferent is the norm, and negative situations arent as common, and something about the way our brains are wired makes those negative situations have a stronger impact on our memeory and makes them more memorable. And because of this, people like to think negative things are more "real" than positive
If you buy a new hat, and 3 people you know say it looks good, but 1 person says its ugly, you are more likely to think the 3 first people where just lying to you and that it was actually ugly the whole time, rather than maybe the 4 person just had different tastses in hats.
Now I explain this negative type fallacy to move onto this next point.
If all feedback on classic wow is bad, then that means anyone saying something positive is obviously just a blizzard shill or fan boy. Because its not negtive, and therefore not "real" like all the people complaining.
So when blizzard said there will be loot trading in classic wow, the clasic wow community went with this point and just kind of ran with it. The argument in opposition to loot trading is 2 fold, 1 is the "no changes at all camp" where they want everything exactly the same and dont welcome any changes. And the other are people who arent as extreme, but want pretty much all of the vanilla wow experiences and dealing with ninja looters was part of the vanilla wow experience.
I personally think the reasoning blizzard gave for this change was pretty reasonable. The thing was you could eventually trade loot in vanilla wow too, its just you needed to send in a ticket and wait a couple of days for a GM to give you the item. Adding loot trading strait to the game just saves blizzard time and money. And the whole thing is a pretty minor point. Your still going to obtain the gear in the same way, the only change is that ninja looters will have to try a little harder to steal gear, but they still can, and you dont have to be inconviened if you accidently give the loot to the wrong person.
The argument against loot trading wants all the inconviences though, but if its at he cost of blizzard wasitng more time and money on loot disputes which dont really affect the vanilla experince that much anyway, I can see it as a very reasonable change.
But no, this is such a huge deak to the classic wow community that pretty much all of the people who make videos on classic wow have already made videos about it claiming that the sky is falling and that the game is dead in the water because of this 1 minor change. Which is just so counter-productive to thier cause in my opionion. If blizzard sees such a large outcry over such a minor problem, it just cheapens the outcry when you need to complain about an actual problem.
Because I am by no means saying they shouldnt complain. Complaing can be a positive thing and you cant expect to see change if you dont do something about it. My complaint is that constant large outrage over small problems just cheapens the power of launching massive complaints.
The other major complaint people have currently is the sharding. And this one is for the community people. I'll tell you strait up that I do not care 1 bit about the community aspect of vanilla wow. I am a solo player, and I play and enjoy wow by myself as much as possible, and only finally joined a guild when I wanted to try raiding. That being said, I do understand the complaints from the classic wow community who enjoys that aspect. and I wont dismiss thier arguments in favor of a strong community just because I personally dont care, even if I know for a fact they do not care at all about the solo players. And sharding does go against the...
(It just stops there mid sentence)
Classic WoW Gatekeeping and Making Mountains out of Molehills
-Topics to address
-Classic wow should be experienced in 1 certain way
-Complaints about classic based on this assumption.
-Loot trading
-Shading in starting zones
-Make sure to add disclaimers
-Negative fallacy
-Complaining in of itself isnt bad. In fact its needed to an extent, otherwise nothing will change. The problem is compling a coupious amount over small things, and making them seem like bigger problems than they really are.
I should start off this video with a few things. For 1, I am excited about the classic wow servers, and as someone who has made a ton of videos on vanilla wow and earlier parts of wow, in fact wanting to learn about how the game was before I started playing was a big part in why I wanted to start making videos in the first place. So I am very intrested in Classic wow servers and the sucess of its launch. However, the community around classic wow has a few major problems that I hope to adress in this video.
The 2 biggest things I've noticed, is a rampant amount of Gatekeeping, and making mountains out of Molehills with every change. And I think those 2 points are intermingled a bit.
So first off, what is gatekeeping? Gatekeeping is when someone takes it upon themselvs to deiced if other people are allowed to have acess or rights to a community or identity.
Take this example from Urban dictionary
"Oh man, I love Harry Potter. I am such a geek!"
"Hardly. Talk to me when you're into theoretical physics."
In this example, speaker number 2 is gatekeeping the term "geek" and person 1 cant possibly be a geek from merely enjoying harry potter. They need to be into hard science as well. And the most common use of gatekeeping in the classic wow community, is that if you did not physically play wow in vanilla, you are not allowed to have opinions on classic wow, or your opinions dont matter.
And here are the common examples of gatekeeping I see when it comes to the classic wow community.In order to have the correct opinion of vanilla wow, you need to have..
-Played in vanilla wow when it was current
-Enjoy grinding
-Enjoy the community aspect and or Enjoy grouping up to accomplish goals
And if you dont share all 3 points, then your not a true classic wow fan.
Now before I go more into this topic, a little side note. So instead of trying to edit this video to only fit my narrative, I'll be showing both sides of all these arguments to give a little bit of nuance to these statements.
That being said, there is some merit to these gatekeeping points. If you played vanilla wow when it was current, your more likely to know more about how the game was played in that area and will probably have more credence to your statements than someone who did not.
If you dont enjoy grinding or at least tollerate it, your not going to like vanilla wow as that is what 90% of the game is.
And if you dont enjoy the sense of sommunity or grouping up to accomplish goals, your not going to be able to raid or pvp at the highest levels and have a hard time with certain quests.
So it only seems logical that a classic wow fan should share all 3 points. Except for the fact that people can look forward to classic wow no matter what. If you didnt play in vanilla, its fine to want to see what it was like. Hell lots of people who play private servers pretend they played in vanilla anyway so its not easy to figure out who really played vanilla or not. It shouldnt be the be all and end all point of having an opionion on how classic wow functions
If you dont like grinding, your probably going to quit classic wow really fast. I cant help but agree with the gatekeepers on this point.
If you dont enjoy the community aspect or grouping up, well good news! Vanilla wow has tons to do for solo players, its just going to be a little difficult. And at max level if you want to progress, your going to have to interact with people, you dont have a choice in the matter. But heres a thing about wow that a lot of people who gatekeep this 3rd point refuse to admit. WoW is a fun single player game. They will vehemently defend this point, and say if you dont enjoy the community aspect your shouldnt play an mmo and try another game. But at the same time, wow is just a strait up good single player game to some people. And the gatekeeping for this argument is nasty. The gatekeepers on this topic hate it if you call wow a good single player game, and will cite the genre of game wow is as some kind of magic be all and end all point to the matter, that wow is a massively multiplayer online game, and you cant play a multiplay game by yourseld. And you know what? You sure can, and lots of people enjoy doing it. They just dont speak up very much because this topic is gatekept so hard core. And I can see why, if they start to admit that wow has lots of single player content, they might think blizzard will put more effort into making the game more single player friendly and kill the community aspect, which is kind of what they did do to the game to an extent.
See? presenting both sides of the argument even if it goes against my narrtive. Something I do not see if the many negative videos I see on classic wow being thrown around youtube. Which kind of goes into my 2nd point. People making mountains out of molehills.
Now this sint something unique to classic wow, pretty much all video game communities fall into this trap in some way or another. And once the majority of videos and posts made about something is negative, saying anything positive is met with backlash. Theres this unique problem with human psychology, where we are hard wired to remember negative things more strongly than positive. If someone is rude to you at the bus station, your more likely to remember that a week later, rather than 99% of people who were pleasant to you, or the person who help you pick up your ticket after you dropped it. Because people being nice or at least indifferent is the norm, and negative situations arent as common, and something about the way our brains are wired makes those negative situations have a stronger impact on our memeory and makes them more memorable. And because of this, people like to think negative things are more "real" than positive
If you buy a new hat, and 3 people you know say it looks good, but 1 person says its ugly, you are more likely to think the 3 first people where just lying to you and that it was actually ugly the whole time, rather than maybe the 4 person just had different tastses in hats.
Now I explain this negative type fallacy to move onto this next point.
If all feedback on classic wow is bad, then that means anyone saying something positive is obviously just a blizzard shill or fan boy. Because its not negtive, and therefore not "real" like all the people complaining.
So when blizzard said there will be loot trading in classic wow, the clasic wow community went with this point and just kind of ran with it. The argument in opposition to loot trading is 2 fold, 1 is the "no changes at all camp" where they want everything exactly the same and dont welcome any changes. And the other are people who arent as extreme, but want pretty much all of the vanilla wow experiences and dealing with ninja looters was part of the vanilla wow experience.
I personally think the reasoning blizzard gave for this change was pretty reasonable. The thing was you could eventually trade loot in vanilla wow too, its just you needed to send in a ticket and wait a couple of days for a GM to give you the item. Adding loot trading strait to the game just saves blizzard time and money. And the whole thing is a pretty minor point. Your still going to obtain the gear in the same way, the only change is that ninja looters will have to try a little harder to steal gear, but they still can, and you dont have to be inconviened if you accidently give the loot to the wrong person.
The argument against loot trading wants all the inconviences though, but if its at he cost of blizzard wasitng more time and money on loot disputes which dont really affect the vanilla experince that much anyway, I can see it as a very reasonable change.
But no, this is such a huge deak to the classic wow community that pretty much all of the people who make videos on classic wow have already made videos about it claiming that the sky is falling and that the game is dead in the water because of this 1 minor change. Which is just so counter-productive to thier cause in my opionion. If blizzard sees such a large outcry over such a minor problem, it just cheapens the outcry when you need to complain about an actual problem.
Because I am by no means saying they shouldnt complain. Complaing can be a positive thing and you cant expect to see change if you dont do something about it. My complaint is that constant large outrage over small problems just cheapens the power of launching massive complaints.
The other major complaint people have currently is the sharding. And this one is for the community people. I'll tell you strait up that I do not care 1 bit about the community aspect of vanilla wow. I am a solo player, and I play and enjoy wow by myself as much as possible, and only finally joined a guild when I wanted to try raiding. That being said, I do understand the complaints from the classic wow community who enjoys that aspect. and I wont dismiss thier arguments in favor of a strong community just because I personally dont care, even if I know for a fact they do not care at all about the solo players. And sharding does go against the...
(It just stops there mid sentence)
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