My Blizzcon Experience: Part 2 – The People

While I didn’t get to meet everyone who was there who I follow on Twitter or through blogs, websites, etc., I got to meet so many amazing people. I only wish there had been more time to spend with each of them because what you need to understand about me is I’m sappy. Like, really sappy. I really LOVE my friends and I get the warm fuzzies when interacting with them. I’m kind of like a gushing 13 year old girl in that way. When I really like someone, I get all crazy excited for any opportunity I have to chat with them. I think sometimes I wear people out because I’m pretty much always excited to talk to them when there are times maybe they don’t feel like talking. But I also have a self esteem issue (again, 13 year old girl) that leaves a bit of doubt in my mind when meeting people in real life if they truly enjoy me or if they are just being polite when we chat online and are secretly rolling their eyes during our conversations. So meeting people was my highest priority for Blizzcon and was also the thing I dreaded the most. Seriously, why are we all such ridiculous basket cases? Humans. Ugh.

Obviously the most exciting ones I would meet would be my guildies. I joined Business Time in January of this year and very quickly felt comfortable and at home there. So seeing some of the people I had been talking to on such a regular basis in game was the most important to me. But as I mentioned above, I was a bit nervous that I wanted to meet them more than they wanted to meet me. That’s not a reflection of them at all, that’s totally my issue. I am a product of my raising. When you spend your childhood hearing you’re worthless and no one ever really wants to be around you it becomes entrenched in your brain, no matter how old you are now or how incorrect you know it is. It created an inner voice that won’t go away. But I am a happy person so I do my best to ignore it and power through my fears. I can usually tell within a few minutes of meeting someone face to face whether they actually think of me as a friend or if they are just someone who’s polite. Reading body language and seeing eye contact is a good indicator. Once I’ve established things are good, I relax and get over my doubts. Of course, I still have the “okay, they like me but am I spending too much time in their space” thing but that’s a whole new can of worms.

Okay, this post wasn’t supposed to be headed this way. Let’s get back on track.

So everyone knows Vidyala and Vosskah are awesome right? Because they totally are. I had gotten all sappy about them a long time ago because they’re just fantastic people. They are also the people who completely eased my worries about meeting them before I actually ever did because this happened:

In ALL CAPS even, which makes it mean even more.

They want to meet me? What? Without me initiating it? What? People don’t do that if they don’t actually want to meet you. Okay, it’s Thursday, I haven’t even made it to the hotel yet and I already know I’m going to be fine. Seriously, that was HUGE. These two… the best. I needed that, I appreciated that and I now totally ❤ them even more than I already did. Kim and I checked into our hotel, Vid and Voss walked over to meet us and we walked somewhere and ate something. BUT MOSTLY I GOT TO HANG OUT WITH VID AND VOSS. Yay!

But of course the day got better because later on we met up in the lobby of the Hilton and were joined by guildies Rhidach and Antigen. We grabbed a table and sat down for some drinks and conversation. Our other guildie who had tickets, Tass (@beartank), didn't arrive until later in the evening but we all got a chance to chill out in Vid's room after the WoW Insider party and the line to pick up our badges. It was awesome. Over the course of the next few days we got to spend more time together as a group, including a small, cozy sushi dinner on Saturday night that was just so fantastic and relaxing.

Because it was all happening so fast and there were so many people and so much stuff going on, I am not even going to try and write down any when and where details for most of the others I met. I likely wouldn't get it right if I tried. But I do have a mostly complete list (I believe) of peeps I got to meet from hanging out in the Hilton and attending the WoW Insider party. I'll use their twitter names to make it easier: @KelistiMMO, @Jasyla, @hestiahdruid, @AppleCiderMage, @Tikari, @orkchop, @MarconinWoW, @Kristin @Jedsblog (meeting him involved much Twitter coordination – yay for Twitter), @beruheals and hubby Brade. I had @AngryOrc and @Sha of Happiness pointed out to me, but they were both swarmed with people and don't know me, so I didn't go over to officially meet them. Though I should have. Just like I should have said hello to Ghostcrawler and Chris Metzen on those occasions when I found myself 2 feet from them. Sigh.

I also had two very exciting meetups on the convention floor; one by accident and one that was a determined wild goose chase. Lol. I came across @Draynee while she was in her amazing costume and I didn't even know it was her. I had stopped to take a picture of her and she totally noticed my custom art badge I had commissioned from Vidyala. She pointed at me and was like "hey, I follow you on twitter". I totally stared at her blankly and said "and you are?". Yep, I'm quite the charmer. But as soon as she told me who she was I was so glad she had recognized my name because I got to say hi and gently steal a hug from her while trying not to mess up the costume in any way. Yay for chance encounters. The wild goose chase involved the wildly popular Navimie. I was determined to meet her before leaving Anaheim so I started tweeting her to try and coordinate locations. We missed each other several times by several minutes each time because so many people wanted to be Navispammed she just didn't stay in one spot very long. But it all worked out and we finally found each other and spent a few minutes gushing at each other. I even got her to pose for a picture which I immediately tweeted out to prove I had been #navispammed irl. Meeting these two was awesome.

Sunday involved a trip to DisneyLand with Kim, Vidyala, BeruHeals and a few others. I’m not actually trying to be secretive in any way about who was there, but I totally never asked them if it was okay for me to blog about it, so I will be cautious and not mention them. There was a group of 8 of us though and it was a really fun day. We rode rides, we watched shows, we ate at The Blue Bayou inside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Just a fantastic time. I’m glad it worked out that we could all go together. All of us girls bought ears to wear. I’m such a nerd, I bought R2D2 mouse ears. I love ’em.

I’m sure I’m missing someone or some detail, but suffice it to say the whole people thing was amazing. If I get a chance to go again, I’ll totally go in a bit braver and will be determined to be less shy so that I can add even more people to my list. Of course, I can’t end my Blizzcon posting without saying a big thank you to my friend Kim, who attended with me and was my roomie for the weekend. Kim and I have been friends for almost 8 years now (and co-workers that entire time as well) and I take total credit for getting her started playing WoW. She isn’t in my guild, doesn’t have a Twitter account or follow any blogs too closely, so she didn’t have the same sort of agenda I had yet she patiently (mostly :P) followed me around so that I could meet all these people. I did mouth her about the fact that she didn’t adjust away from her normal sleeping hours so she crashed out hours before I did every night (srsly, like 7 – 8 pm LOL) and got up hours before me (2 – 3am) but that’s because of her work schedule so it’s just a total habit for her. She’d go to bed and I’d wander over to the Hilton. It worked out fine. I was just glad she was there as my security blanket – someone I knew well and could be comfortable around at a time and in a place where I was nervous about everything. I may even allow her to go again if I get tickets next time. Maybe. 😛

The One Where I’m The King

Last week I made a quick post saying I had finally ordered new internet. The update on that is … it’s a bust. No new internet for me. They contacted me later to say they don’t actually service my address. So I’m back to square one. But I have been spending some time at my friend Kimber’s house soaking up her internets and nomming all her foodz. And while I was over there the other day she told me about the King of Spider Hill achievement. Now I hate spiders but I love achievements. I had to think it over for a while, but since my achievements are few and far between these days I finally decided to face my fears and kick some spider ass.

Kim had coached me on the correct path to take up the mountain and how the mechanics of the whole thing would work. What I didn’t realize is that my fat moonkin ass was going to be a problem. When the spiders pulled me up to their platform I fell off most of them. And sure, the spiders immediately grabbed me and pulled me back up again, but then I fell off again. I was trying to move forward onto the ledge but my big furry/feathery ass just wasn’t hanging on. After 3 quick falls one after another, my health was too low and I quickly died on the next fall. Would you believe I repeated this process and died like 4 times before I finally realized maybe I should just fight these bastards in my skinny night elf form? And yes, that strategy totally worked. I never fell off another ledge. I had been in moonkin form because i could burn em down faster but the spiders were kicking my bumbling butt. So if any of you laser chickens out there have not yet completed this achievement, I recommend you do it without shape-shifting.

Flowchart Fun

Okay, since I seem to always be in the blogging mood at work and I am now unable to blog at work, I thought I’d give the free WordPress for Android app a try. I won’t really know how well this does or does not work until I can get home in 4 hours and see for myself. Here goes nothing.

I now present a flowchart of a typical day in Elfi’s World. It is a hand-drawn flowchart and for some stupid reason I titled it about Elfi’s inner thoughts. But that’s not accurate. This is actually an account of what I do with my time in-game. I drew it up & then took a picture of it with my cellphone. Lol. It’s like redneck high tech around here.

click to embiggen

The One Where I Offer Excuses and Random Screenshots

I am stuck in a vicious cycle… I am stressed out and my game time is becoming very limited which stresses me out and causes my game time to become very limited which stresses me out and…. you get the idea. The big move to a new apartment is quickly approaching and yet, not approaching quickly enough. So much stuff is packed up, my life is in disarray currently. I’m still working overtime AND for some damn reason (I’m gonna blame stupid co-workers who dare to watch Netflix all night long) the internet at work has been locked down since last Friday. So, no more blogging at work like I like to do. And even though I can view my favorite blogs through Google Reader, the images that are in posts are blocked and it’s not very enjoyable to read posts that way. Grumble.

Things around this blog had already slowed down a bit over the past few weeks, but I’m here to tell ya – it’s going to slow down even more for the next little bit. I already screwed up and didn’t get a Screenshot Saturday post up over the weekend. And what little content may see the light of day here, will probably be fairly boring. Not having much time to log in and play means I don’t have anything real interesting to talk about. Be prepared to see a lot of screenshots. And probably mostly old screenshots from my older, crappier pc. Hooray!

I am also open to accepting guest posts if anyone out there has too many for their own blog and wants to share. I am moving during Memorial Day Weekend and I cannot wait to get everything settled, get my pc set up on my new desk and get right back to some serious work on my reps and my gear.

Now here are some completely unrelated screenshots:

Here’s some old guild chat fun with WWAB…

Riding Kim’s rocket through Tol Borad…

My goblin having a Space Balls moment…

Some fun, exploding sheep….

Killing King Krush….

The One Where… Ah Screw It

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but the title of this blog is Elfi’s World yet there rarely seems to be any posts about game play information specific to Elfi. You may have also noticed that the ‘About’ section has said “coming soon” since the very first day. Neither one of these two things are like this intentionally; but this weekend I believe I realized they may be subconsciously related to each other. I don’t have anything to write about me because I’m just not sure where I’m at or where I want to be. On Saturday I finally began to realize just how not happy I am. That doesn’t necessarily mean I am unhappy or miserable… I just am not as happy as I was hoping to be at this point in the expansion. I had been excited about having a weekend where I had the time to stay at home and play as much as I wanted both Saturday and Sunday. The problem was, when I got up and logged in Saturday morning, I was all alone. No one in guild chat. Just like it had been Friday morning when I logged in. Just like it is a lot. And yes, since I work the midnight to 08:00am shift, my hours don’t quit match up as conveniently with others as they used to. But this isn’t about my hours. It’s about a broken guild.

I’ve mentioned before how I was excited and ready for Cataclysm and had high hopes for myself and my improvements in game play. But shortly after the expansion launched, my guild was consumed by drama. I remained cool and fairly optimistic. After all, it’s only a game, right? Unfortunately, less than a week later, it hit too close to home for me to remain cool and optimistic. For the first time ever, I was upset, stressed out, and depressed about the World of Warcraft. Now for the record, I remain friends with the GM I mentioned in that last post and shortly after this particular post was published we talked about it. She was upset that I was upset and she felt a bit misrepresented. Which I freely admitted was probably true. I also admitted I had written that post just an hour or two after everything went down and I allowed my hurt feelings to rule the pen more than I should have. But I decided not to alter the post in any way because that’s a reflection of a moment in time for me. That’s exactly how I felt and it sucked.

Fast forward a couple of months and you’ll find me still upset. How ridiculous is that? Not badly upset, just a touch. I get a tinge of jealousy when I hear about how the people who left me are having such a good time. I know I shouldn’t take it personally and I know they aren’t trying to make me feel bad at all. But knowing those things doesn’t make it suck any less. Some people might say I should just break contact and then I won’t know how much fun they are having. But I don’t want to. I enjoy the small conversations I get to have with the people I miss so badly. So I guess I actually am torturing myself. Now I just have to figure out what to do about it. Somewhere lost in the midst of all this is the fact that I really REALLY wanted to concentrate on raiding more than I ever have. Guild runs were basically out the window, so I pugged my way through enough randoms to get geared up for heroics. I survived my first pugged heroic with only a slight problem with an asshole dpser after we made it through the final boss. The next pugged heroic didn’t go as well. We lost 2 tanks and 1 dps and then wiped repeatedly before we finally all agreed we didn’t even want to do it anymore. I did get a few good heroics in with a former guild officer and her husband who keeps in touch with me and invited me along for a few runs. But then heroics just sort of came to a standstill for me. I’m too nervous as a resto druid to pug them, so I’ve essentially just quit. It’s not like I’m going to have a chance to do any raiding anyway. Now Elfi just farms herbs and does some dailies.

I know what you’re thinking, why am I spending $15 a month to be not happy? Well like I said at the beginning, it sort of just now donned on me this weekend how I was feeling. And like I also said, I’m not necessarily unhappy. When there are a few people logged into the guild we have some good chats… while I’m standing in SW not doing anything and not running any 5mans. You have to understand, none of this has anything to do with any of my guildmates. They have done nothing wrong, we’ve been scraping ourselves up off the ground and we’re actually standing quite tall. It’s just that there’s not very many of us. I’m afraid there may not be enough of us for me to get what I want from the game.

So why don’t I join another guild? Maybe the guild where I know some people and keep hearing about how awesome it is? Well, because I have a lot of thinking to do. There’s one little hitch there that is like a splinter in my mind and I have to decide if it’s going to remain a splinter or not. Also, I’m one of the most fiercely loyal people you will ever meet. I always have been. No matter where I work or what type of group I’m in, I am proud of it til the very end. So I really have to weigh things out. Problem in this situation is I am fiercely loyal to my guild… but it was partially based on my fierce loyalty to my GM and even though she’s now gone, if I’m being truthful, I still feel some loyalty towards her.

At this point I should probably say that I know there is at least one of my guildmates who reads this blog. Kimber, I love you babe. I want to assure you I have not made a decision to leave the guild. Nor have I made a decision to roll a new toon in another guild on our server. I am thinking about possibly doing one of those two things. But if it happens you guys will get advanced notice, I will not discuss it here until I’ve discussed it with the guild, and I will provide lengthy explanations. Right now there’s nothing for you guys to worry about. I’ve just got a lot on my mind.

So that’s the current state of Elfi’s World. The shit ain’t pretty right now. I was so emo about it this weekend (also blaming hormones) that because I had planned to play the whole weekend and then realized I kind of didn’t want to talk to anyone, I actually rolled a Goblin Hunter on a different server and just enjoyed having fun and not watching guild chat or looking for old friends in SW. It was relaxing. The Goblin starting area is the most fun I’ve ever had while leveling a baby toon. But I’m a social person and that’s not gonna cut it as a permanent solution. Although I did talk Kimber into rolling a Goblin over there with me and the two of us had our own little personal leveling party all weekend and had a total blast. I thought briefly about how it might be nice to just never go back to my home server and instead stay here in this new place and make new friends and start over. But I could NEVER do that. Azuremyst is my home. And I am way too addicted to Elfindale and my other toons (even though I suck at leveling them) to ever abandon them. So for now I guess I’m just taking a small break from the norm. I will continue working on the Goblin until something clicks in my head and I finally sort this mess out.

Sometimes I Try To Rotate The Internet

Sometimes I launch the game, select a character to login and then instantly develop ADHD and either tab out or simply wander away from the computer for several minutes, leaving all the “hello Elfi’s” just hanging there with no response. Okay, I do this most of the time.

Sometimes I spend hours doing nothing but taking screenshots of myself in game. I’m addicted to screenshots.

Sometimes I login just because I want to chat with my friends. I don’t do anything with my character other than check my mail.

Sometimes I forget what I wanted to do when I log in.

Sometimes I want nothing more than for Kimber to be online, then when she arrives… she doesn’t play with me.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t have Real ID. Not because I don’t want to see when my friends are online, but because every once in a while I’d like to hide out.

Sometimes I remember the good old days in my guild and wish those would return. Okay, I do this most of the time.

Sometimes I kick myself in the ass for not starting a journal/blog when I first discovered the game and started leveling Elfi. I didn’t know ANYTHING. Those stories would have been hilarious.

Sometimes I wish I would talk more in vent. Then I remember I always say dorky things.

Sometimes I wish I had all the items and materials and gear levels, etc. memorized. Then I remember ‘eh, that’s what google is for’.

Sometimes I get so involved in my questing/dailies/etc. that I forget to pay any attention to my chat windows.

Sometimes I wish I had the spare money to buy a fancy gaming mouse.

Sometimes I really crack myself up in guild chat and no one else laughs. Okay, I do this most of the time.

Sometimes I wish I had a huge WoW setup with two 22″ widescreen monitors.

Sometimes I am glad I play on a 17″ widescreen laptop because I can take it anywhere.

Sometimes I wish I had never started playing WoW.

Sometimes I wish I had been playing since Vanilla instead of halfway through TBC.

Sometimes when I’m logged in, I wish I were out somewhere with friends.

Sometimes when I’m out somewhere with friends, I wish I were logged in.

Sometimes I am so used to rotating the screen with my mouse that when I’m not even in-game, I try to rotate the internet. Okay, I do this ALL THE TIME.

Screenshot Saturday

Who needs enemies when you have friends like Kimber….

Click on the picture to enlarge it and make it easier to read: