Guppy Gossip 6.4

I write a weekly fantasy football article for my league. It's usually not very re-printable due to excessive misogyny and f-bombs but this week I thought it was both above-average in quality and clean:
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Welcome comrades to Guppy Gossip Perestroika edition!
This week we have many good things to share with fantasy football brothers and sisters all over our beloved homeland. The heroes from the front lines have made their sacrifices for our enjoyment and we can all make sacrifices too for the betterment of all Russia. We look at the heroic deeds they have done right now, shall we begin?

1. Tony Romo - Comrade Tony brings us many glorious touchdowns to Dez Bryant and many yards and scores, for the betterment of his home province of Texas but for all of us as well. We are proud even in his failures for he symbolizes the mediocrity, the victories and failures we all share in, these values we all hold dear.

2. Tim Tebow - Although we do look down on religious distractions here in the motherland, we still admire Tebow for his strong arms and work ethic. The plains of Colorado imitate the endless fields of Russia which must be worked every day. Our hard labor brings us together so we know we can face any enemy. Our love of land and home is what makes us strong but we also love our work horse, like Tim Tebow, a bronco is a symbol of strength and unity.

3. Fred Jackson - This tall warrior is seen on our government-issued televisions looks much like Egyptian Pharoah, but yet he fights in the cold weather like our soldiers helped defend Stalingrad. There in Buffalo they enjoy cheap vodka to help forget about work and ease the drive to our homes. Stalin would be proud that the Bills would not give up just like we did not give up. He runs just like the cowards who hate communism run in the night from our KGB agents. Ha ha.

4. Wes Welker - Of course you knew we would honor comrade Welker! He too left the warm lands of sunny beaches to suffer just like we do! Last year he earned his White Devil name by laughing at enemy coach's love of wife's feet. Any chance to laugh at a capitalist or freedom we must do so. They only take our best people by seducing them with money. But we would never be so foolish. Russian women cook better, can drink more and are more warm although American women are coming more closer to it. Wes Welker makes snow-angels during football game to remember home in Ukraine!

5. Adrian Peterson - This is our best secret agent. Nobody would expect black man from Moscow, but then this is their foolish loss not to know! He makes his best playing while Tavaris Jackson or Donovan McNabb throws, yet nobody is suspicious. Only fumbles the ball for Brett Favre in playoffs. Americans are seeing him being the best runner again, well they are the ones who will be sorry! He helps us distribute the best communist pornography from Minneapolis but there is subliminal communist messages inside. You may already be under their control, we know what you watching!

Eli Manning - This is our biggest failure. The evil capitalist values are most strong in New York. Our KGB planners failed to see that Eli could be a double agent. The tall buildings made him doubt that all homes should be owned by our government. Who needs to own your own home when the state distributes to us whatever our needs are? Even worse, he would not drink the Stonichnaya vodka we send, fed the caviar to the family dog. We hate him more than we hate Ivan Drago. You do not play for yourself, you play for all Russia! Or else.

Diablo 3 RL $$ Auction House

I just read the news that Diablo 3 will have 2 auction houses: a regular in-game auction house like the one in WoW, and a real money auction house where you can sell or buy items for real money. I am 100% in favor of this, in fact I am totally psyched. The reason I am against this in WoW is that gold and item farmers were so rampant in early Wow, they were everywhere hogging up all the best spots, even attacking players who entered their territory, and not letting players do their quests in those areas. They were everywhere, they spoke little or no English, it was ruining the game. But in Diablo 3, you can play online but in your own world if you want, where there are no gold/item farmers to bother you. Then if you want to sell that sword you just got for 75 cents to somebody, you can go ahead and do that. If you find a way to make the equivalent of minimum wage playing Diablo 3 at home, more power to you. If you want to spend your money on those things, more power to you. I seriously doubt that people will be able to make much money at it, I think supply & demand will kick in and that items will sell for very low real money. But who knows? You will also be able to avoid an extra charge and spend your money in the Blizzard store if you want(smart thinking Blizzard) so if I want to play Diablo 3 all month and get a t-shirt at the end of the month for my work, well shit, to me it's better than sitting on a bunch of gold that I don't need(like in WoW). It just adds another dimension to the game that makes it interesting, and Diablo 3 is the perfect game for it. Also, I was worried about conflict of interest regarding Diablo 3. I was worried Blizzard would lose money because people would play Diablo 3 instead of Wow, so Blizzard might start charging for Battlenet. Well, now they can make some extra money off these transactions, maybe that will make up the difference. I just really, really like this direction, and can't wait to play Diablo 3.

100k club

I know there is no official or unofficial 100k gold club. But for me, it's a big deal. I think when I started Cataclysm I had around 12k gold or so. And that was pretty much gone right off the bat buying all my characters the fast mount flying speed for 4k each. I am thinking something that maybe is the reason that people who get to 100k keep on going to 250k or higher. And that is, 100k is basically 3 high level epics off the auction house. So it doesn't seem like a huge amount really. I still have 200 pyrite ore in the bank so I am thinking I will let my sub run out, then wait to see if pyrite can be prospected for epic gems at some point later, then maybe play some more. Right now I have 15 days left on my account and I am trying to finish firelands dailies for 3 characters. Honestly, that was fun for awhile but now I hate doing them. Also I have a gnome warlock, am trying to get the ram epic mount so I log him on every day and do Ironforge fishing and cooking daily. That's the plan, Stan.

Why I sell bags

I read a lot of gold-making blogs. And by far the most common ways that the best gold-makers use to make gold seem to be jewelcrafting and inscription. Well, I don't do either one of those things. My main income is from selling bags, mostly embersilk but also some abyssal bags. I do sell some enchanting materials and other odd-and-end stuff, but bags is my main thing. And specifically I would say an average profit of only about 500g a day.
The obvious question is, "Why? Why make 500g a day when you could make more doing something else?". First of all, I am fitting in where needed. Before I started, embersilk bags were going for over 400g each on my server. When I take a couple of days off, the price goes back up to that. Well, I think that sucks. In fact, I will say, in my opinion, that is a sign of a weak side faction(in my case horde). Especially where bags are concerned, this is a disadvantage across the board. When bags are too expensive, less people buy them, less people have them. Then less people can carry as much, and profit as much selling their junk, because they have to delete things that won't fit, or make more trips to vendors. If your faction is strong, the bags are affordable, and many players have high-capacity bags. So, I feel this is my niche, not one of self-sacrifice, I mind you. I am happy with the amount of money I make, and I feel I contribute in general to people having more money in the future, which hopefully they will spend on something I am selling (Who knows?). By the way, I'm up to 50k now, still got 30-something truegold and about 300 stacks of pyrite ore waiting to be sold as well. 100k here I come!

Gold #2

Well 4.2 came out, and truegold prices have hardly gone up at all so far, I guess since players cannot make the new blacksmithing recipes yet. But first thing I noticed was that players were actually asking in trade if anybody was selling lesser or greater celestial essences. I put up a stack(10) for a 900g buyout, and it sold really fast, so I put up 2 more, and they sold really fast. So I put up 10 individually for 150g each, and they sold too, albeit more slowly. Well, I am almost out of them, so I will leave that market alone and build up my stash again for when I actually need to do some enchants myself. I sold more bags, and actually sold some stacks of pyrite at 150g each. I have almost 300 stacks in the bank now so I am relieved to get rid of them. They may be selling for 200g or more later, but I don't REALLY want to be sitting on 300 stacks. I am back up to 33k gold and I have 31 truegold also in bank, so doing much better now. Probably I will slow down on gold making and just work on those pesky little hyjal dailies now to get some easy purples. I may do them with all 3 lvl 85's if I can handle it emotionally, we will see. It's a little annoying everybody trying to do them at the same time.

My Wow Goldmaking

I wouldn't call myself a "goblin" as far as gold making. I am not interested in making huge gold profits and storing more than 100k gold. But I am interested in having enough gold that I can invest in something if I want to, take some chances without worrying, and buy something nice once in awhile, also. In Wrath, I had gotten up to 23k gold, but late in the game, I spent about half of it trying to get a new character ready for raiding. However, my guild had a bunch of drama, and basically I showed up for a couple of raids, one that failed, one that got cancelled, and it turned out to be an unwise use of money. So I started Cataclysm with maybe 12k, can't remember exactly, it might have even been a little less than that.
My goal in Cataclysm was to slowly accumulate gold, not to make huge amounts quickly, but to be diligent in doing things to earn gold and to not waste gold. So first things first, I did all the quests with 3 characters, from Mt. Hyjal through Twilight Highlands. I only bought any weapons or armor on the auction house if they were "steals", and I made sure to sell any blues I got instead of keep them. I made sure to farm materials with my professions as I leveled and sell the excess in the auction house. The profession I have concentrated on, outside of that, for gold making is tailoring. I make the 26-slot bags every couple of weeks and sell for about 4k, I also use potions of treasure finding and farm the tiny treasure chests along with embersilk on the coast in TWilight Highlands. I probably average an embersilk bag sale a day at an average of 300g. Also I do dragonmaw and therazane dailies at least up to exalted with each character. My last level 85, a blood elf warrior, is an herbalist/alchemist, so when I do Twilight Highlands dailies, I make sure to farm a few stacks of twilight jasmine while I am there and sell a stack of mythical healing potions for about 350g. Other than that, I have invested in pyrite ore, hoping it will end up yielding purple gems to jewelcrafters and the price will go much higher. I have about 200 stacks of pyrite ore waiting in the bank, as well as 20 truegold, and transmuting another truegold each day. Hopefully the price on that will go up also after patch 4.2 comes out and all the blacksmiths need it for new recipes. Lastly I am making hardened elementium as there are blacksmithers buying it up ahead of said 4.2 recipes. I will continue to sell that after 4.2 comes out unless I run out of elementium and get tired of farming it. I was up to 40k gold cash plus my investments however I did buy my warrior the crafted epic shield and a soul blade. A bit of an indulgence however I felt I have earned it and am earning it by doing well at making gold and investing well. My goal is to get over 50k as a minimum and (maybe) get up to 100k before I am done playing Cataclysm.

Pay by the minute

Blizzard should stop charging by the month and start charging by the minute. Somebody who plays 4-5 hours a day, does their stuff, and logs out, will pay around 15 bucks a month. Somebody in China who runs the account 24/7 with farmers/bots will pay 5 times as much since they are online on that account 5 times as many hours. Somebody married with children who can only play 2 hours a day will pay less than $10/month. Also, the more time Wow is down for maintenance and patches, the less money they make. So they will hurry and get things up again. Players will think before going afk and making everybody else wait for them, which they won't, since they are paying by the minute, too.

New computer!

Eh. I'm building my own computer for the first time. Reason I say "Eh." is that right now I have an empty computer case, power supply, motherboard, 8GB memory, and a video card in a box sitting on my 2 sofas in my living room. I'm using the hard drives and DVDRW from this one(computer). And I'm just tired and irritated from working too much lately so I don't feel like dealing with it. I am super-excited, though, also, just got to get in the right mood to do the job and get it up and running. I think I have everything I need, and I made preliminary inspection of the parts, I do believe I ordered correctly and everything is going to snap into place and work just fine.
I'm only slightly annoyed that after buying the things, newegg made a "build your own computer sale" and the price of the memory and oem windows 7 went down, but I did get a good price on the AMD Phenom II quad-core ($120) and gtx460 video card($150). Other prices I paid was only $50 for the case, $78 for the memory, $65 for the power supply, $80 for the motherboard. Oh yeah and $100 for Windows 7. Everything was no tax and free shipping except the motherboard, paid 7 or 8 bucks to ship that.
I still owe a lot on my credit cards that I am trying to pay off, so that is the reason I am being cheap with how much I spend on it and building it myself. Also I worked a couple extra days the past few weeks, and I paid 2 years at a time last June for my car registration, and get 5 paydays this month, so this seemed to me like the month to do this. Hopefully in a few days I will post a reply to this saying that I love it so much, etc.....

Sometimes the internet is lonely

Sometimes the internet is a lonely place. After work, either playing World of Warcraft or reading and posting on other people's blogs, it fulfills whatever social needs are still left over after work. And sometimes, like today, it doesn't really fill that need and it just feels like a lonely place, which mostly it really is. If nobody I know is online, even though it's other people playing, it seems the same as a single-player game. Of course it's mostly because of my own choices to stay to myself most of the time. You can't have it both ways, if you are very popular, there are sometimes where it seems like everybody is bugging you and you can't get away. If you stay to yourself, there are some days like today. All of life seems to be that way; give and take. And of course there is the fact, at least I think it's a fact, that humans are hard-wired that way; I mean that nobody is wired to be happy all the time with the situation they are in. That's why I like to play orc instead of human, since orcs are wired for beer and cocaine. Just kidding ha-ha. I have been working very hard leveling up a warrior and now that I am at 83, it's like....I'm just about there, but instead of being excited, I feel like I'm about to fall flat on my face. Does that mean it's time to take some time off, or to fight through it? I think I'll fight through it.

Survival, freedom, and success

A human's, and any animal's first instinct is to survive. It takes precedence over all else. After that is the need to be free rather than be a slave. Especially important is freedom to come and go where you want. Only after a man or woman can survive and be free, do they then need to be successful. This is the problem where MMOs always fail. When they are new, the game is exciting and meaningful because you are trying to survive. Even the weakest creatures outside the inn or other safe area can kill you. Then you need to be free to travel, to go to other villages or cities, meet with other players, explore new lands. This also is very meaningful and acquiring some levels, basic equipment gains you that freedom. After that, some feel the need to be successful, to go into the dungeons and kill the most powerful monsters. But not everybody feels the need to do this very strongly.
For an MMO to always be highly entertaining, a player's survival and freedom must always be threatened. At the very least, there should always be somewhere that a player cannot travel to safely. There is a large percentage of players who will never feel a strong need to conquer monsters in dungeons to gain more power, that will allow them better chance of conquering even more monsters. A player's basic needs must also be challenged constantly. It is perfectly acceptable for this challenge to increase in difficulty. Just because it is "outdoors" should not necessarily mean trivial. Just like new dungeon content should get harder and harder, so should outdoor content. Perhaps a new quest hub should require players to pair up, or in threes, just to get to a new flight path/quest hub. Perhaps faction work also would be necessary. Don't just challenge the overachiever dungeoneers. Challenge questers and explorers. Challenge everybody, in many different ways.

Youtube site

I have a Youtube site with some World of Warcraft movies I made at http://www.youtube.com/user/yaggle52. I'm not saying they're great, or even they're good, I am just saying the Yaggle that does this blog is the same Yaggle that has that Youtube site. I figure everything else gets stolen online, I had better lay my claim to my own site before somebody else does.
Plus there is a link from there to here, so there probably should be a link from here to there.

Tanking is stupid

You need to kill something, you need to damage it. Well, if you are going up against something really nasty, you want to wear armor to protect yourself, right? The idea of "tanking" something in a role-playing game is pretty stupid. Anybody going up against a fire-breathing dragon is fair game and could get killed. Besides, dragons are smart, so they're going to go after the guy firing magic missiles at them, maybe. But the problem is, you can't protect the mage, can't keep him alive long enough. The dragon has to attack the "tank". Sure, okay. But the mage, as well as the priest, and the rogue, and the hunter,shaman,druid, etc. can't be getting hit because they will die. They will die because they can't use the best armor. Well, there's the problem. Who decided that? Just because Gary Gygax said that the magic-users can't wear plate mail, well screw him and the horse he rode in on. You think about it. You can cast a spell. You're going to fight a dragon. You're going to wear more than a bathrobe and a magic ring. You will find a way to make it happen. Wizards could wear armor in Michael Moorcock's books, and it made sense. My MMORPG should make sense, too. No more tanking. Everybody wears lots of armor. The warrior may have more stamina, but the wizard might have a ring of +5 protection and better saving throws. Who the hell knows, but stop with these weird and stupid rules where one player cons the boss mob into only attacking him(or her).

Hunter skinners are poachers

In connection with my last post, from a RP perspective, one reason I was starting to hate my hunter that I deleted, was that he was a poacher. Being a hunter and a skinner means that the awful truth is I shot and killed thousands of wild animals. I just could not do it any more. The irony is, hunters have animals as pets and supposedly take care of them. Well, I read a story about a year ago about a woman who loves animals that married a trapper. He killed a bunch of coyotes and brought home a young coyote that he did not kill, so she raised it as a pet. I do not want to be that guy.

Lv 85 deleted

I deleted my oldest character today, a lvl 85 hunter. I had 2 lvl 85 hunters, so I deleted one. He was my leatherworker, however, other than that he was unnecessary. And I have been more and more dissatisfied with leatherworking in WoW. I know it could be said, "Why delete? What harm does it do to leave the character alone?". It is hard for me to answer this logically. A character in a RP game often is more than just stats and abilities. It is an extension of yourself, or a particular aspect of yourself. I did not wish to pursue this aspect any longer. All characters are a project, and I do not wish to leave uncompleted projects lying around that I no longer wish to work on. It is so easy to level a character now anyways, that if I wanted another leatherworker, I would level up a different class character as a leatherworker.
Also, it was rather tedious leveling both hunters, and getting them basic decent gear with gems and enchants. I do not want to do this again.
My other level 85 hunter, named Yaggle, I still play and enjoy. I am "adopting" some of Mourndarr's(deleted character) pets by re-taming and giving the same names. So in a way, at least in spirit, he is still with us, and RP-wise, the pets will still get plenty of food and exercise.
It is hard to let go but it is the only way to move on, improve, and be happy.

I feel really stupid

I got caught up in the RIFT hype. I guess I want a new,exciting MMO so badly that I jumped off a cliff. I read all the hype about Rift, looked at their website, and it looked really cool. I watched a couple of YOUTUBE videos, and it looked even cooler. So I bought it and even paid the extra 10 bucks for the bigger bag, riding turtle, and pet because I was so sure I had found my new game. Well, my computer cannot handle it unless I put the game at the minimum settings. It just, well, it's playable, but it's not more awesome than Wow when it looks like that. It just doesn't look like I wanted it to look. I like Rift, I think it's a good game. But I don't really think it's better than Wow, just different. And if I could play it at high graphics settings, I might have gotten sucked in. Instead, 60 bucks got sucked out of me.
I went to the Indian Casino here in Tucson(there are 4 in or near town actually) today and won about $570, which, sure, takes some sting out of it. But I have been gambling since I was about 20 and I have learned a few things, one of them is that, the $570 and the $60 actually have nothing to do with each other, and 60 bucks is 60 bucks, whether or not I won money today. Also, gambling isn't actually a smart thing to do, so I basically did one stupid thing after I did another stupid thing. Just because I won doesn't mean it wasn't a stupid thing. Realistically, I never should have blown that 60, nor went to the casino. My bad spending habit is a catalyst for my gambling habit. I need to be more careful about impulse buys such as RIFT. My account is already cancelled and I only played it for 2 or 3 days. I guess it was actually TRION's(publisher of RIFT) lucky day.

Get rid of resilience

Resilience is a terrible stat in World of Warcraft. People with more resilience on their gear have an advantage in pvp over people who don't. People who raid do not get resilience on their gear because the tank gets protection against crits through other stats, and everybody else does not need it, so they want gear with other stats instead. What resilience really does is make it so people with pvp gear are better at pvp but worse at raiding, and people with non-resilience gear are better at raiding but worse at pvp, at least as far as their gear goes. Their actual experience with either raiding or pvp already makes them better at whatever they usually do.
My point is that you should be able to get good gear doing pvp, and be able to take that gear to a raid, and that gear serve you well in the raid, as well as good gear gotten from raiding should help you when you go to do pvp. You earned that good gear, it should be good for both things. If somebody geared up doing raids and now they are in your battlegrounds, why should it bother you? You usually do pvp so you already are better than them. And vice-versa. And adding another stat for no good reason is annoying and wasteful. Get rid of resilience.
I almost said we should get rid of hit rating also, but, there may be balance issues there. Maybe you don't want the balance druid to be able to heal as well as the resto druid, well the balance druid can't, because he geared for hit rating instead of intellect, spirit, or spell power. Maybe there are issues for other classes as well, so I won't go there on hit rating. But resilience just places limits on players so they are only geared to do what they usually do. And I think that's stupid.

Cataclysm rocks

Well, I held out for 2 months and did not buy Cataclysm. But then I did. I still have issues with the game, the same old ones I did in Wrath of Lich King. But this time, I think the good outweights the bad. I started playing through the starter (lvl 80) zones in Cataclysm, Mt. Hyjal and Vah... well, the underwater zone, whatever it's called. I liked them except for the linear quest progression that feels more like I'm reading a story going on an adventure. I made a goblin and leveled to 20, and enjoyed the starting goblin quests. Then I made a blood elf mage and went to the undead area since I knew it had a major overhaul. THIS is where I decided that Cataclysm seriously rocks. I played until I got to lvl 27 and got to Tarren Mill and I have to say, that was probably the funnest(sorry not a real word, I know) 27 levels I have ever been through. Plus the plants vs. zombies-esque mini game with the singing sunflower pet reward was a blast. The mad undead scientist who thought Johnny Awesome was Jenny Awesome was exceptionally gratifying to kill. Overall just a great time. The sheer amount of work that went into this expansion blows my mind. I still have a lot of it to experience since I got both my hunters to 83 only. And if I don't get that flaming turtle pet, I think I will die. YES! I like Cataclysm.