My Warcraft Year in Review Meme – Take 2

Alright, I did this a couple of weeks ago and decided at the time that I didn’t really want to tag other bloggers with it because doing that feels wrong to me. Why? Because it’s sort of like a chain letter, someone sends it to me, I send it to five people, they do the same, etc., etc. Part of my responsibilities at work is to find people who are doing this kind of stuff with their work email and kill it before it starts perpetuating. It just feels wrong!

But feeling that way bothers me more, enough so that over the last two weeks I keep on thinking back and who I should have tagged. I mean, come now this is the freaking WoW Blogosphere we’re talking about here! We’re here to help each other, encourage ideas, share our thoughts, and all the crazy business.

In the end, my desire to be part of this great community of WoW bloggers won me over, so it’s time to take another shot at this and actually do what I was asked to do. So let’s try this again shall we? And this time, we’re playing tag!

My Warcraft Year in Review Meme
1. What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?
2. What was your favorite new place that you visited?
3. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
4. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
5. What was your biggest failure?
6. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
7. What do you wish you’d done less of?
8. What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?
9. Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

1. What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?
This question is both hard and easy to answer. It’s hard in that I only played for a short time in 2008, so almost everything was new. It’s easy in that, well, everything was so new.

To list a few, I did the following: Reached level cap, purchased epic flying, made my first successful twink, left my first true “home server”, switched from playing primarily Horde to Alliance.

Take 2: Thinking back a second time, I’d say the two main things I would list here are actually the switch from Horde to Alliance followed by testing out a Roleplay server.

2. What was your favorite new place that you visited?
This one is pretty easy as there really wasn’t much of anywhere that I went this year that I didn’t reach in 2008 save for the higher leveled areas of Northrend. To pick a single place though, I will have to go with the AQ40 raid. I went there for the first time a month or so ago with our main guild on the new Alliance server, Durotan-US. We had a blast in there and I found that I really love running around on the mounts that drop in there. It really sucks that you have to be in the instance to use those mounts, but it was really cool to go in there for the first time and really nail one of the big raids from the past that I was certainly nowhere close to being ready for while it was actually being played.

Take 2: This one doesn’t change at all. AQ40 was amazing.

3. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
I think I’m looking forward to actually participating in some of the end game raiding in 2010. Not a whole lot, but a little bit. I’ve never been a fan of raiding, and I don’t expect to become one any time soon either, but I just recently got a new computer that I think can actually handle the the load that an honest raid will put out where before I would lag like crazy if there were more than 5 people in a group.

Take 2: The more I look at this question, the guild that I’m in, and the goals I really have right now, I’m not sure that I’m any more likely to raid in 2010 than I was this year. In the end it all comes back to the fact that I just don’t care for the experience leading up to raiding. I like going into the raids and seeing the more serious content there, but I don’t care for a gear grind, a reputation grind, or anything else of that nature. It’s just not something that I enjoy in the least. So scratch that idea.

Instead, what I want in 2010 that I didn’t have in 2009 is a home. I think I’ve found a home server now that I really enjoy, but that’s the extent of it. What I need is a guild that I fit into, I need to stop joining these raiding guilds that my wife is a part of because I don’t care about raiding. I need to find myself a decent guild that really fits in with what I want to do, or at the very least get some more friendships going on the server beyond the five or six people on the server that I really consider friends.

4. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
There really wasn’t much in the way of achievements this year in the use of the WoW term, so I’m going to say that reaching the number of views on my blog would be my greatest achievement of the year. I think I did quite a bit to move up from being “just another WoW blogger” to having people actually care about what I’m writing. As I check the stats on the blog, I find a lot of people constantly referring back to things that I wrote here, particularly in relation to the Prot Paladin. So I know that to at least some degree I am actually reaching my goal of helping people.

Take 2: I think this one holds true. Not much was actually accomplished in game, but I’m happy with the success of the blog.

5. What was your biggest failure?
My biggest failure is going to tie into one of my biggest changes, which was the swap to playing Alliance rather than Horde. I had two of my friends end up paying to transfer their characters to my Horde server, and this year my wife made the switch to an Alliance server herself and after going to help her get a start I actually found myself really enjoying the server as well. So much so that I actually very much dislike playing on my old Horde server now except for the occasional run.

I also left a fairly good guild because I wasn’t going to raid and joined another which decided shortly after my joining them that they would open their doors to everyone. The guild now has over 500 members who constantly talk about random, stupid crap that makes me actually leave the guild channel in another chat window that I never look at just so that I can ignore them all.

So basically I screwed myself by switching to a fail guild, and then I screwed two of my friends out of actual money as they transfered the characters over to play with me and then I changed servers myself. For those reasons, I suck.

Take 2: This still really sucks, and for that I really suck. I don’t know what to do on this one. Do I leave friends to play with friends? Do I split up my own time to play consistently between two servers? I don’t know the answer to this one, I just know I screwed it up.

6. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I think the only thing that really got me excited this year as far as WoW goes is going to have to be Cataclysm. I’m still excited about it even though we have no idea when it’s actually going to hit the shelves yet, and I can’t wait to jump in there and get started on rolling a whole new set of characters.

Take 2: Nothing’s changed here, they let the Cat out of the bag early but it’s still got me stoked.

7. What do you wish you’d done less of?
I wish I had done less of my twinking. While I had a great deal of fun doing it, and I’m still doing it even now, I wish I had done a bit less. The blog stopped getting updated while I was doing it, I pulled away from other players quite a bit while I focused on doing my own thing, and so on. It’s a great deal of fun to twink a character and to really get to know the ins and outs of your abilities and increase your knowledge and skill with the character, but it has its drawbacks sometimes too which you don’t always see until it’s too late to fix them.

Take 2: I think the bigger picture here is wandering aimlessly. I move a lot between doing this or that, and whatever it is that I’m doing at the time is what I focus on. I can’t just dabble in a little something over here for a few and then jump back to my main focus because whatever I take on takes the slot of main focus when I do it. If I decide to go jump on the twinks for a bit then they become the focus. If I have a bad match and want to go level a different toon to wind down a bit, then I get focused on the leveling. Right now I have no direction, and that can be a good thing in the freedom that it offers, but it also drives me into being a loner in almost all aspects of the game. And while I’m fine with that and prefer it in most cases, I do actually enjoy doing things with other people and being able to be social.

8. What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?
This one is really hard, actually. There are a lot of things that I like about a lot of the blogs that I read out there. Narrowing those down is a bit too hard, so I’ll just link a few that really come to mind right off: LoreCrafted, Darraxus the Warrior (Real Azeroth Heroes, especially), Cynwise’s Battlefield Manual, Through the Eyes of Death, Empowered Fire, Slice and Dice, Troll Bouquet, and Shaman on Ramen.

As far as podcasts go, I’m still new to them and the only two I even listen to (and on an infrequent basis at that) are For The Lore and WoWPhiles.

Take 2: Nothing new on this one.

9. Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.
My reply here is actually going to be almost exactly the same as the one from which I was tagged who said, “I learned that it is not worth it to offer up constructive criticism or unsolicited advice. Even if you think you are friends with someone and see themselves repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with their poor communication skills. Even if you see them run folks off with their communication style and their lack of respect for others’ ideas and opinions. Just keep your mouth shut. Because all you’ll get is a black eye for trying to help someone be more aware of how others are perceiving them.”

In my blogging I try to go into a lot of detail to break things down and explain in such a way that anyone could pick it up and put it to use even if they were brand new to the game. I don’t always do the greatest job with that, but I try. It has recently been brought to my attention though that using the same type of language in replies or offering of my own opinion makes me come off as more of a jerk than someone trying to help.

So I’ve learned something quite a bit like what Miss Nexxi there learned, that giving advice when it isn’t asked for, no matter how useful or important it might be, is better left ungiven.

Sometimes I actually want to get someone upset, to show them how stupid they’re being, or to tell them they’re screwing things up for the rest of us. And in those cases I come right out and smack you upside the head and tell it like it is. But for the most part, I just want to open doors, broaden views, or give some insight into things that people don’t know or haven’t figured out yet. The key is expressing that without coming across in a completely different manner, and while I haven’t learned yet how to do that, I have learned the need for it.

Take 2: Moving right along then.

5 Folks I’m tagging to Complete this Meme
As I said at the top there, I’m not tagging anybody in particular with this. It’s just not the kind of thing I do, personally. So instead I’m going to offer this up to the first five people that feel like taking it upon themselves to do so.

If you’d like to tag yourself with this, then drop me a link to your blog in the comments to this post and I’ll add your name and your link to the list below:

Enough with the giving into my inner workaholic, it’s time to give into my inner altoholic and spread the love. But most of the people that I know pretty via Twitter have already done this or they have blogs that are pretty strictly focused on a specific topic and I don’t really want to ask them. So I’m going to tag some people whose blogs I read frequently where this might work and might not, despite how little I know some of them, and we’ll see if it catches at all. Will they join in a meme from someone they barely know, or in some cases don’t know me at all? We’ll see.

1) Restokin.com
2) Tree Bark Jacket (My twink still needs one of those, btw.)
3) Honor’s Code
4) Righteous Defense
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