MoP Beta: First Glance

Ooooooooooh. Aaaaaaaaaaah.

And boy, I tell ya, this is only a glance. In the few days that beta has been available to me, it seems like everything got broken. Merinna has spent a combined 25 minutes trying to TP to the new continent so far, during three different log in sessions. That lil' load bar has gone further than it ever has before as I start writing this post. We'll see if it makes it this time.

Pandaland:  The pandas animate very very nicely. Honestly, there is more character in the way these characters move than just about any character models I have seen in the game. On the slight downside, even a Pandarian warrior looks like Kung Fu Panda, which is to say the Pandarens are stereotypically unacceptable to me.

My adventures through the Wandering Island came to a screeching halt at Level 2 when I found the "Edict of Temperance" to be unburnable due to the fact there are 146,354 other player characters trying to do the same thing at the same time and even a /tar Edict macro won't let you connect with the damn thing. (and no, the "/c interact Edict of Temperance" macro that is being spammed on site will not help either).

Stop ... Beta Time!

Whoa-oooh! Whoa-oooh! Whoa-oooh!

Argh. Like sand in an hourglass, so go the days of our lives ...

I can't begin to sum up how much I'm not playing WoW these days. Instead, I'm writing my thesis and working my butt off at school. In my spare time, I like to sleep.

The ugly truth is that I really don't have time for WoW anymore, and yet I don't feel like I'm really done with Azeroth. So, I lurk out and read blogs far more than I the game.

I keep writing blog articles as well, but rarely post. Honestly, I think I'm stuck in a negative mindset about WoW right now. Honestly, Cataclysm is not the best work Blizzard has done. And since I can't play the way I'd like in Azeroth either. I sometimes write a blog entry that I go to revise and it sounds like an icky screed of QQ and Blizzard-hating. There's enough icky screeding and Blizzard-hating on the interwebs already, and I'm trying not to recklessly add to it.

A bunch of the officers in my guild got it in their heads that we needed to transfer servers to get better raiders. When the rest of the officers said, "That might be a good idea, let's hear a plan for that." the ones who wanted to transfer just left. Apparently, they have problem constructing simple sentences in support of an idea. The second graders I teach have that problem too. What a disappointment. But that has left my guild crippled and it hurts because I have felt so strongly about my guild and there are good people still there and I'm so totally not in a position to do anything with the situation.

But, Warcraft continues onward. The MoP Press Tour came and went. The beta started cooking. They revealed the final raid of the expansion and let me just point out what I wrote on June 14, 2011 about that.