kinless
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Breakfast Topic: Is your guild structured and sure or chaotic and competent?
The question in the title comes straight from this very interesting post on Kinless' blog. He and his wife are in different guilds. His guild has a raiding calendar and they adhere to it religiously. His wife's guild has a raiding calendar which is completely ignored. Whoever is online at any given time gets to raid. I would think the more structured guild would be ahead, but the more loosely organized guild is moving along nicely. So nicely, in fact, that both guilds are progressing at about the same rate.How does your guild do it? Formal or casual? And does your guild's style work for you or are you enduring it to get what you want from the raid?
Hello! Are you a farmbot?
I've run in to more than a few farmbots in my day -- often in Winterspring, while farming Timbermaw reputation. The furbolg you had to kill to gain favor with the Timbermaw also happened to drop good coin and runecloth, making them lucrative targets for farmers. The bots (characters controlled by a computer program of some sort rather than a human being) were always easy to spot. They'd follow a set circuit around the area, taking down targets one at a time. When the area was empty, they would return to a spot near its center and spin around in circles until they managed to target a fresh spawn -- and then they'd begin running an identical circuit. Depending on the particular farmbot, sometimes I could game their system and let them farm reputation for me. See they've targeted something? Assist them and use an instant attack to tap it before they can -- back when I was doing my reputation farming, the farmbots didn't have seem the intelligence to notice if something had been tapped after they've targeted it and sent in their pet to attack. (They were, of course, always hunters.) A real person would certainly be annoyed by this behavior, but the farmbots would simply continue their cycle.However, a post up on Kinless' Chronicles makes me wonder if the farmbots have managed to get smarter. Kinless noticed an orc hunter constantly (from 4AM to 4PM, server time) mining thorium in the Eastern Plaguelands. That information alone simply screams farmbot to me, but there's more to the story that makes me wonder. On one encounter with this suspicious hunter, Kinless decided to follow him along his farming route. The hunter dismounted in Hearthglen and started to fight the elite guards there. Figuring that anything worth this much effort to an obvious bot must be wealth indeed, Kinless ventured inside to see what was there. And inside? He found not a single thorium vein and he barely made it out alive. But in his chat box, our friendly farmer was kind enough to wave him farewell before mounting up and leaving. Kinless explains the quandary:This is a live player, with brains, who does nothing but farm mineral nodes across Azeroth. (I later noted him in the Barrens, Winterspring, Burning Steppes.) He does nothing but farm, and plays round the clock, and does not own the expansion. He's certainly not funding a main, or a twink, since he's got no time. And it's a live player since he played that little trick on me.This isn't possibly an entertaining way to play the game, so what's happening here? Is it an improved intelligence bot? (Now with new player-baiting technology!) Or are we seeing live players out farming for real world profits? Unless we can get them to start answering whispers, we may never find out.
Is ten character slots enough?
You may or may not be aware of the fact that you are only allowed ten characters per realm. For some, this is not a problem, and for others it is. Kinless writes about his dilemma, with the upcoming expansion, in which he will find himself wanting 13 character slots on a single realm. (I feel his pain -- I'm going to have to pick a character to delete in order to roll my expansion Blood Elf on my usual realm. And then I'll have to delete a second character if I decide I want to try my hand at playing a Draenei!)Of course, Blizzard allows for this, in a way. You can always put your alts on a different realm, which has the notable side-effect of giving you something to do when your usual realm is down -- but that means playing away from friends and guild-mates. Starting over on a new realm isn't for the faint of heart: when you've made a name for yourself on your old realm, and regardless of your alt's name you're likely able to find friends and help when needed. So is ten character slots per realm really enough -- or do you find yourself wanting more?
