Easing into Endgame

World of Warcraft is an interesting creature.

It is, of course, an MMORPG-- "Massively Multiplayer" being the first two words in that acronym. And yet if you want, you can go through much of the game without really dealing with too many people. That's what I did. Oh sure, there's other people you can interact with and there's a living breathing economy, much like on Neopets which is what I played pre-WoW. But you can level to 70 basically without any outside help.

When I was level 19 or 20 or so, I did Deadmines because somebody told me I should. It was my first ever instance, people were impatient with me (to be fair I was the worst hunter of all time at this point-- pet on aggressive and immolation trap for the win) and the whole experience really left a negative impression on me and after that, with the exception of a few run-throughs by higher-level friends, I hardly did any instancing at all until I hit Outlands.

And this is where it started to get interesting, because this is where our guild really started to grow and we started to do stuff together. Our little Karazhan group that we have now has been running stuff together since Hellfire Ramparts-- heck, a few of us have been running together since Zul'Farrak. But for the most part, we went through Outlands together, running instances as we encountered them and sort of learning together. This has culminated in what I think is a very solid group of people who know how to work efficiently as a team.

So you'd think the level 70 endgame would be a breeze right?

Well, it takes a lot of work that really hadn't occurred to me beforehand, simply because I've never played an MMO with situations like this before. Karazhan is a ten-man raid that takes quite some time to do if you're still learning it. So it's a pretty big time commitment. And it's really hard to sync up the schedules of so many different people, most of whom have school or work or even the military going on in their real lives. And it just so happens that as a guild officer, I am now in charge of trying to plan this and get it together, and keep everybody happy.

It's a little bit stressful and it pushes me out of my comfort zone, and I have to admit it had me worried for a while. Had WoW finally turned into a job? Was I breaking my own "it's a game" rule by continuing to play?

But I've been thinking about it and I've decided-- WoW isn't just any ol' game. It is an MMORPG as I said at the beginning of my post. It has plenty of solo content, but if you want to really, truly unlock the "massively multiplayer" portion of it, it's going to take some work because other people are involved, not just you. But that, I think, is part of what makes endgame so rewarding.

It's not everybody's thing, and that's quite okay. In fact, as I even told my boyfriend the other day... "Sometimes I catch myself wishing that I could just go back to when all I had to worry about was how many kobolds I had left to kill." But in the end, as much as I do truly love the solo content of the game and the leveling (hence all the alts), I also love running instances and raids with my friends. And to experience that, you've got to be willing to put in a little effort... more than you might initially expect.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I've been a little scarce these past couple of weeks. Because I had to take a little break to sort of define the game in my head and decide if the sudden new "work" aspect of the game that jumped on me without warning was justified. I've decided it is.

As is running into Orgrimmar with a couple buddies when you're bored, just to see if you can actually hit Thrall once before dying:



I think I got in a single Arcane Shot. It was epic.

Geek is the New Black

Now I'm not one to hide my nerdiness and all-out geek pride.

But on the other hand, it's not something I bring up with a whole lot of people. Largely I think it's just because I assume that not very many people can relate to me if all I ever do is talk about Linux and video games. In order to get to know people, I sort of subconsciously stay on their level of interests, which I'm pretty sure in most cases is not mine.

But I sort of got tired of it today. Tired of beating around the bush. Tired of going "Um, er, ah..." when people ask me what my hobbies are or what I do in my spare time and I wonder what sort of blank stares I'd get if I told the whole truth.

Somebody asked me today what I'm doing tomorrow. I said "Raiding Karazhan with my guildies in World of Warcraft." "Oh... okay," was the semi-stunned response. It was all slightly awkward but I felt good. I'd unabashedly outed myself and it was nice.

In the breakroom at work today somebody came in and sat down across the table from me. We sat there munching on donuts and he asked me what I did last night. I said "I played video games." "Ooh, what games?" "World of Warcraft." "Ah yes," he said. He'd never played it but he knew a lot about it. We talked about XBox 360 games and Starcraft 2 for a while before he finished his donut and made his exit.

Not long after he left, two other people came in. One was a departmental manager and the other guy was someone who started working there not long after I did. They had McDonalds and they came in and sat down at the table and set up their food. Then the manager turned to the other guy and said simply: "I'm telling ya, mining, herbalism, and an epic flying mount, and you'll be set for life."

The other guy replied, "Well, I've just got mining to supplement my engineering. I finally learned how to make the +10 damage scope for myself yesterday!"

The engineer, as it turns out, began playing five months ago or so and is a level 65 hunter.

I told him if he made Goblin Jumper Cables, people would love him if he feigned death in an instance and could then rez the healer. He was pretty impressed with this idea.

He said he was trying to work on gaining rep with a lot of factions so he would have kind of a headstart when he got to level 70. I told him to start working on his Cenarion Expedition rep so he could nab Glyph of Ferocity.

Then my break was over.

I foresee some more fun chats between the two of us in the future.

Apparently I was underestimating the world's geek level. And I'm glad to say so.

On a completely different note, my boyfriend, Mr. Pike (though he prefers to be called "LS"), the infamous warlock who little level six Tawyn trekked across the world to find, started his own blog a little while ago and now feels he has enough content to warrant some visits. So go on, head over to Wearing Black in the Back and read what he has to say about roleplaying (both in and out of WoW), warlockery, and a variety of other goodies.

*pushes you over*

I live! I promise!

Huge apologies for the lack of meaningful posts recently, and my lack of presence in the WoW blogging community in general. Basically I've had a lot of stuff going on lately both in-game and in-real-life, and on top of that, I've hit a bad case of... maybe not writer's block so much as "Editor's Block". I have probably five or six posts I've written on various subjects in the past couple of weeks that are "in queue" but have not been published because I'm unsatisfied with them, and I'm having troubles trying to fix them so that I am satisfied with them. So they don't get published. I'd like to get them all out there someday, though.

In the meantime, rest assured knowing that all is well in Pike's WarcraftLand. I've been logged into Tawyn a lot, doing Kara and various heroics and rep/gold farming. A lot of my alts are sadly being neglected, though, in favor of a... Top Secret Project which will reveal itself later. Whether or not the Top Secret Project goes as far as I want it to, I can't say, but this particular one has gone farther than most of my others, so... we shall see.

Locke! What're you thinking?

Cheating on me like that...

Hunter Kindergarten: Chain-Trapping 101

I'm enjoying this movie thing so much that I decided to make my very first real instructional movie:



Tawyn and Tux show you the basics on how to chain-trap in an instance.

I noticed something though. Something that didn't even occur to me until afterwards when I was watching the finished product.

...I kept using certain pronouns.

...like "we"... and "us"...

...is it a hunter thing, or is this what happens when you read too much BRK? Have I been permanently transformed? Am I doomed to refer to myself in the plural form from here on out? WHAT SORT OF MONSTER HAS BEEN UNLEASHED?

/cough

Enjoy the movie, hopefully it's helpful to some of you =D And I promise I'll start posting some non-movie stuff again too.

And yes, I know I have a dorky voice.

How to: Make a World of Warcraft Movie

Loronar asked me to write up a little tutorial on how to make a WoW movie.

Sure thing!

This is going to be super basic. No need to download too many fancy programs. This means you won't be able to do too much fancy stuff with your movies, but you WILL be able to make a basic movie and add your own sound and that type of thing.

This tutorial is written for Windows XP because it's what most people use and because sadly, there does not seem to be a good solid program yet for Linux that works well with WoW/Wine. I've looked. I imagine they'll have one out probably in the next couple of years but until then, I use Windows for my movie-making needs. (I imagine the tutorial for Vista would be similar-- but I've never used Vista so I can't say.)

How to Make a World of Warcraft Movie:

1.) Download Fraps. Fraps is the only program I've found thus far that works as well as it does. There are other free, open source programs out there which I'd rather be using but most of them are still sort of "in beta" and do not work with WoW, at least not as well as you need it to. So for now there is really one thing you can use to record a movie if you are on Windows, and that is Fraps.

You will need to pay a one-time fee of about $35 to unlock the full program (being able to record more than 30 seconds at a time). If you don't feel like paying a fee I'm sure there's other ways to "acquire" the full version. But you didn't hear that from me. =P Myself, I just coughed up the money.

Basically after you pay you'll be able to access a "members only" section of the site, and download a full version.

2.) Install Fraps. Straightforward enough.

3.) Open Fraps. You have some options in here you can play with. The options are pretty self-explanatory. I myself left pretty much everything at default, although I did disable sound recording so I could record my own sound (also because it saves a little disk space). On the subject of disk space, the movies you are going to be recording will be huge initially, so make sure you have a lot of hard drive space available.

4.) Minimize Fraps and boot up World of Warcraft. You will notice you have a number in the upper left corner of your screen. This is not going to go away so long as you have Fraps running. It displays your Frames-per-second. If the numbers are yellow, it means you are not recording, if they're red, it means that you are. The numbers will not show up on your finished movie, so don't worry. Now let's say you just want to record a test movie to make sure everything's working right. Press F9. It'll probably open one of your bags, but wait, it also makes Fraps start recording! See, the little number in the corner turned red. And if you have a computer that boasts pretty good but not excellent stats, as mine does, you will probably notice that your game is slightly choppier now. You will lose some FPS while Fraps does its thing, but unless your computer is really outdated the game should still be playable, if a little bit choppier.

5.) You can run around for a bit, shoot some stuff, whatever you want to record. Then press F9 again to stop recording. The number will turn yellow again and your game will probably get a lot smoother. And your bag will either open or close again. (You can go into the options and set the default recording key to something else if you don't want it to also open your bags. Or you can just do what I do and open your bag before you record, so it closes it when you start.)

6.) You now have a movie in your Fraps folder, which by default is C:/Fraps. But you're not finished yet because maybe you want to add music-- not to mention the movie is way too big to upload to YouTube right now. Fortunately, Windows comes with something called Windows Movie Maker. Just go into your Start Menu and find it, it's not in any subfolders or anything.

7.) Open Windows Movie Maker. You have a sidebar that gives you some options, you want to click on "Import Video" and navigate to your Fraps folder and import your movie. Now it's going to show little thumbnails of parts of your movie in the main area. Drag each of these parts, in order, down to the timeline at the bottom and arrange them one after the other. You can press play to preview your movie and make sure you got all your thumbnails in there (one time I forgot and finished/uploaded an entire movie before I realized that a portion of it was missing-- do not let this happen to you! =P)

8.) So you have what we in the industry call "picture lock". (Look Mom, I'm using my degree!) This means that the picture part of your movie is all finished and you just need to add sound. Go back to the sidebar and click on "Import Audio or Music". Now you can navigate to maybe some music you want to add, or some narration that you made, and import it in. It's going to show up with all your movie thumbnails. You can drag it down to the bottom section of the timeline and move it around so it starts and ends when you want it to. You can also trim your song if maybe it's too long, you do that by finding the end that you want to clip, waiting until it turns into a little double-headed red arrow, and then dragging it down so it matches up in length with your movie. If you have more than one sound file you'd like to use, you can upload more than one and put one right after the other.


9.) Now I should warn you-- chances are your audio clip is going to be very very loud by default. To fix this, click on your audio, go into the "Clip" menu at the top of the program, go into Audio, go into Volume, and set it so it's a lot lower. (You can also fade your audio in and out and a few other basic things here.)

10.) Alright, you can play your movie back and if everything looks good, head over to "Save to my computer" on the sidebar. It will give you some options about what to name your movie, where to save it, what size you want it to be, etc. If you want to make a fairly-decent-sized movie you can upload to YouTube or Blogger, I recommend saving the movie as "Other Settings: High Quality Video (Large)". Eventually it will get to a part where it has to process your movie; depending on how long your movie is this will take ten or fifteen minutes or so.

11.) After processing you've got a nice little WoW movie sitting on your desktop (or wherever you decided to save it)! Congrats! You can now upload it to YouTube, Blogger, or something similar-- be aware that the uploading process for both of these also takes ten or fifteen minutes or so.

And there you have it, that's how you make a WoW movie with minimum amounts of fuss. Have fun filming!

Traptacular Trapathon

When you are chain-trapping, possibly your two most important assets are: firstly, making sure your trap cooldown is up before you first pull, and secondly, distance. Putting distance between yourself and your trap helps more than I think many people realize; it can give you up to some ten seconds of extra time if you concussive shot/wing clip your mob, and still a lot of extra time even if you don't.

I have a lot of hunters who will ask me how I can keep something trapped for so long, and those are my secrets. Starting off with no trap cooldown, and then maintaining distance. If you lose distance, you can still regain it later to maintain your edge-- it's difficult but can be done.

I've discovered I'm really into this whole "movie" thing (I guess my filmmaking degree is coming out here?) so I'd like to show Tux in his motion picture debut in "Trapathon: Tawyn Gets Bored". Basically when I get bored farming Scryer signets, I'll go trap a mob and see how long I can keep him trapped while I burn down the other guys. This is mostly a "just for fun" movie as opposed to an "instructional" movie because I figured BRK already has his fantastic chain-trapping how-tos-- so this is mostly to show that keeping your distance = endless chain-trapping, even if you don't have any points in Survival:



Music: Beatnick vs. Loituma - Leva's Breaks/Caramell - Caramelldansen (Speedycake Remix)

(Yes, this is the type of stuff I listen to when I play WoW. No wonder I'm so upbeat and postive about the game all the time, right? =P)

Another important thing to keep in mind when you're trapping is to make sure that you are inbetween your trap and the mob you are trapping. Sounds obvious right? Well sometimes it's easy to forget and move yourself so you have a better shot at whatever you are shooting at the moment. Always be aware of your surroundings so you can adjust yourself if need be-- for example, you'll notice at around 3:50 that I saw my hapless Trap Victim was running towards me and not the trap-- so I had to quickly move myself so he would run into my trap instead.

So there we have it: Start with your next trap ready, maintain distance, and keep the trap between you and your mob. With those three things you can trap indefinitely, at least until you decide to pull five mobs at once =P And even then you can regain your trapping rhythm and continue trapping indefinitely... well... until the wrong mob runs into your trap anyway.

I enjoy making these movies but I sort of feel like most of the instructional stuff has already been covered by BRK and others such as The Hunter's Mark. But if you've got anything in particular that you'd like to see, let me know and I'd be glad to see what I can whip up! (Oh, and also, let me know if you've got a good solid place where I can host bigger sizes of these movies).