Time to put the “fortune” into Fortune Favors! Announcing our first ever scavenger hunt!
The rules are simple:
You have to be a current guild member.
Be the 1st person to mail the following items to Splat in-game and you win 100 gold.
True to the song, you need to send me that many of each item - not just one of each. (So look for 12 Tough Jerky before you try sending things, and so on.)
You don’t win when you say “I sent it,” you win when I see it in my mailbox.
Whether or not you win all items will be returned to you at the end of the scavenger hunt, so even if you just vendor them you’ll still get a “consolation prize” of sorts.
Don’t ask me where to find these things. All I’ll say is that there’s more than one website that’ll tell you without my help.
Oh, and the list of items…
(Sung to the tune of 12 Days of Christmas, in case you couldn’t guess.)
On the day of the scavenger hunt a guildie sent to me…
12 Tough Jerky
11 Darnassian Bleu
10 Darkshore Grouper
9 Small Barnacled Clams
8 Torn Moth Wings
7 Beer Basted Boar Ribs
6 Kaldorei Spider Kabobs
5 Dirty Trogg Cloth!
4 Strider Stew
3 Melted Candles
2 Minor Healing Potions
And a Shiny Seashell that’s …
Oooooh, shiiiiiiny …
Um, oops, sorry about that.
Ok, so it might not fit the tune exactly, but there’s the list. All of these items should be obtainable by players under level 20 and they should all fit in a single in-game mail. Whomever finds them all and mails them to Splat first will receive bragging rights.
As you can probably tell by the lack of activity on this site, I’ve been spending the majority of my free time exploring that great big continent that wasn’t on our maps a few weeks ago. The same is pretty much true for every active guild member (and person on my friends list) that’s level 70 or higher. Sunday’s Kara run was short people, and Thursday … well, I didn’t even get an invite, so I don’t think an attempt was made.
Of course not everyone in the guild has reached that level - some members are encountering pre-BC instances for the first time. If you have a moment why not help one of them out? They’re cool people, I assure you.
Speaking of which…
I’d like to do some guild events again. I think the last one that wasn’t a Kara run was all the way back in February when we had a parade through Stormwind. Good times indeed. If you have an idea for an event that could appeal to the wide range of levels that makes up our guild, then you can either tell me (or mail me) ingame or email me at splat @ myguildhome.com. These could be just for fun stuff like that parade, fun runs through lower level content (Stocks raid? Hogger raid?), some PvP action, or something else entirely.
In any case, let me know.
[EDIT]
New member Släzenger suggested a scavenger hunt, and it looks like people agree it’s an awesome idea. I’ll work on the list (and the rules) over Thanksgiving break.
It started with the news that Orgrimmar was under attack by elete level 71 abominations and undead dragons. This was confirmed with multiple pictures and even some video. Things were strange in Stormwind Harbor as well, preceding an attack there.
At least on some servers. Not Trollbane, which despite having a large turnout ready for action saw not a single agent of the Scourge. Perhaps our extreme lag scared the Lich King away? Who knows. In the end I had several friends annoyed at me for telling them something was going to happen when as of 1:00 AM all was quiet on the Western Front SW Harbor.
Grats to Flamebait and Docmean, our favorite DPS duo. Last night they managed to kill the end boss, Prince Malchezaar! (I think they may have had a little help, but still…) The last time I saw him he beat the snot out of me.
That I know of, this was a guild first for us - at least on this server. My only regret is that over the past week or so I’ve been too sick to really play my role as a healbot. Looks like they got by just fine without me.
This train of thought started because I got my epic flying mount today. The hula girl on the dashboard makes it go faster. Really.
Hey, don’t laugh! At 95 gold that was far from the most expensive part of the whole ordeal. I was grinding for weeks to get my riding lessons up to snuff!
And that’s exactly what it was. Grinding. Excruciating. Running dailies I didn’t even like, treating the AH like it’s a stock market, all so I could squeeze out another few hundred gold per day … it wasn’t very fun for me.
Oh, the end reward is nice, don’t get be wrong, but for me it’s the journey that should be more important than the destination. And to be blunt, this journey stunk.
World of Warcraft is a game, and unless I’m hired by Blizzard (doubtful, as I wouldn’t apply for a position in the first place) it should continue to be a game, right? Right, and games were meant to be fun.
So here’s the problem - one person’s version of fun is not universal. I’ve met plenty of people who absolutely lived for the end game content. I’ve no doubt when the expansion hits they’ll be power-leveling to 80, in some cases even staying home from work to do so.
That’s not fun for me. After I hit 70 my routine became a round of daily quests so I could afford what I needed to do twice weekly Kara raids, which would get me better gear so I could do more Kara raids. Now, yes, there is a great sense of excitement whenever we down a particularly difficult boss, but there’s more to the game than dungeon crawls.
Fortunately there enough people like me for Blizzard to consider us a target demographic. World events and holidays add a bit of spice to my game time, allowing me to break up my grinding into smaller and more digestible bits. (And let us not forget achievements, which makes the game that much more fun to play!)
And even then I still feel compelled to roll a new alt, turn off all of my addons, crank the graphics all the way up, and bask in the glow of levels 1 through 20. Maybe it’s just because Blizzard wants to immerse new players into the game as quickly as possible, but in my opinion the first bunch of levels are the most enjoyable lore-wise.
And that’s the key, isn’t it? To enjoy the game? We’re not paying Blizzard so we can work in the game, are we?
Look, we each play our own way, but when I find that what I’m doing isn’t fun any more, I’m going to stop and look for something that is fun. It might be an achievement, soloing an instance, or maybe even spending a little time on an RP server. I’ll always come back to my main because, let’s face it, paladins rock, but the moment I feel like WoW has become less than fun I need to either leave or change the rules by which I’ve been playing.
Looks like Blizzard updated the emote list. There’s some new ones in there (/cower) seems to be a favorite for a lot of people), but there’s also some old ones I just didn’t know about before.
(Image courtesy of WowWiki, since patch 3.0.2 broke my model viewer app.)
OK, the Ziggurats floating over capitol cities? Those are cool. The zones that fall “under attack” from level 70 mobs out in the middle of nowhere so the low level players don’t get a major smackdown handed to them? Those are cool as well and (after an apparent fix revolving around the drop rate of the runestones) seem to be getting even better.
But giving players the ability to not only BECOME zombies but also infect everyone else? Not as cool.
In fact, it stinks.
I recall that a while back there was an instance boss that could give players a contagious debuff that would cause them to lose life and then explode. Players with this disease weren’t supposed to make it out of the instance alive, but players are resourceful. They managed to find their way to the AH, Bank, Goldshire, or anywhere else that large numbers of players congregated.
Then they went boom and infected everyone. Do a search and you’ll find a story or two about it - probably on Wired News. I don’t have the time at the moment.
This was, of course, seen as a problem. Blizzard fixed it so it couldn’t happen again, and there was much rejoicing. (Yay.)
The zombie plague takes that glitch, shoves a bunch of steroids into it, clones it, then sets it lose on the world. It’s darned annoying if I can’t go to Bank, AH, the FP of any city, or even TRY to play my lowbie alts because a few 70s with nothing better to do decided to turn Lakeshire into a retirement home for rotting corpses that want to retire you.
“Aw, QQ some more,” say the prepubescents that are taking time away from questioning each other’s sexuality on X-Box Live to kill my Daily quest givers.
Look, on a PvP server, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But we’re on Trollbane - a PvE server. I don’t chose to play PvP usually because that’s not as fun for me. I’m not saying PvP is bad per se, just that it isn’t my cup of tea. If I’m doing a timed quest I don’t want to have to worry about someone coming through and delaying me. If a level 70 challenges my level 22 to a duel and I don’t feel like getting one-shotted, I can ignore them.
But I can’t ignore the zombies, because even if they’re not flagged they end up infecting the NPCs around them.
The concept is kind of neat. The implementation of it, however, is very, very flawed.
For those of you not “in the know,” yes we’ve finally started to do some end game content as a guild! We might not have enough active 70s to raid Karazhan, but fortunately Rowaina managed to help team us up with another guild - Diademed Battle Lords.
It turns out that they needed a few more people as well, so after a few twists and turns it looks like we’re raiding Kara twice a week. “Easy mode” is on Thursdays when we tackle the beginning bosses, and we go after the hard stuff on Sundays.
There are a lot more details than just this, of course. If you have any questions feel free to ask me in game.
I recently created a new alt in a fit of boredom, and I must say playing a rogue has its benefits. That being said, I know I’m not using my stealth ability to its fullest potential. Fortunately, I found this educational film to help me improve my skill:
Fortune Favors is a World of Warcraft guild that makes its home on the Alliance side of the Trollbane server. We're pretty informal, but are one of the few guilds who try to keep things "family friendly."
