I’ve spent more time in Outland now, so it’s time for some additional thoughts. I have to admit, it’s one heck of an expansion!

Technorati Tags: Burning Crusade, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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I stand corrected (actually, I sit corrected, but why quibble?). The launch has had its inevitable problems, but it went far more smoothly than I anticipated. Sure, Outlands was lagged all to hell on the first day, and Honor Hold is still pretty laggy, but that’s inevitable with so many players all trying to occupy the same space at the same time. The Draenei area has had only slight problems with mob shortage on my server, and that got under control pretty quickly. So, here are a few preliminary post-launch thoughts on the expansion:

Technorati Tags: Burning Crusade, video games, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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As everyone already knows, the release date is the 16th, this Tuesday. In theory my copy will arrive from Amazon on the 17th. I figure the whole game will be unstable Tuesday anyway, so why go crazy trying to get in on the first day?

Originally I was thinking that while everyone was busy making their Draenei Shamen and heading to Outland that first day, I’d head out and mine ore for jewelcrafting while waiting for my expansion to arrive. However, I have a new theory: I think that on the 16th, no one at all will be able to play. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if we’ll really be able to play much at all this whole week.

I tend to cut Blizzard a lot of slack. I mean, come on–who could have predicted WoW would end up with 8 MILLION players in this short a time?! There’s no way they could have been prepared, and that means a ton of growing pains. I shrug and work around them. This game costs me less than the price of two movie tickets per month and I get a lot more entertainment out of it than that, so I figure I can take a few hiccups in stride. I have to admit, though, even though they’ve repeatedly pushed back this release date, they don’t seem at all ready. The pre-release patch has caused so many stability problems it’s amazing. I’ve been knocked offline or unable to log on for most of today due to various problems. I know at this late date they can’t realistically push back the release date again, but I can’t imagine they expect to pull this off without some major downtime.

Technorati Tags: Burning Crusade, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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The problem with taking a week off is that invariably we end up playing Warcraft with friends, which means we come up with more T-shirt ideas, but I’m not also putting together new designs–so I end up with a stack of ideas that could last me the rest of the year! I’ve gone ahead and put up the first few new ones, although I intend to stretch them out a bit so there’s always something new going up.

By the way, I don’t think I’ve noted this before, but cafepress does provide a nice little newsletter interface so that folks can sign up for newsletters from their favorite stores (the signup box is generally found at the bottom of the left-hand nav bar in each shop). We do use this feature, although we keep the newsletters brief and to the point, and once monthly for each shop. We’re going to start including subscribers-only sales in each issue, so please sign up if you like our stuff!

We have one new design up in the Caffeinated Chicanery shop, but it’s the start of a long series. In it, a mysterious graffiti artist has found a number of quotes about life and crossed out the ‘l’, replacing it with a ‘w’. The results should prove interesting, particularly as we were really on a roll the night we started churning these out (we have more than 30 ideas to cull):

Get a (W)ife Women’s Dark T-Shirt

There are also a couple of new designs in the Gamers’ Heaven shop, some of which are appropriate to both mmorpg and rpg players alike:

Technorati Tags: cafe press, cafepress.com, mmorpg, roleplaying, rpgs, t-shirts

EXALTED finally! Well, not me. But part of Christmas we spent on Warcraft hanging out with a dear friend, and we finally got him to exalted with Argent Dawn after many long months of grinding. We also kind of tricked him into getting MC attuned–we weren’t sure we could do it with just the three of us, so we told him we were going into BRD to farm elemental cores and dark iron scraps. Then we took the route to attune, and it worked out. That was fun. I also took part in one and a half UBRS runs to help someone work on their Valor set, and ended up with a green santa hat. Woot!

Another day or two and Selene should be able to get her cone-collar off! Her wounds are healing nicely. She has a line down her fuzzy belly that looks like it might well scar, but most of the scabs are gone. It’s so strange to realize she might well end up with scars from an allergic reaction.

Sit. Stay. DIE. Dark T-Shirt

Technorati Tags: cats, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

I tend to be a bit behind the times, but hey, I did finally watch an “ask a ninja” video, of his first live appearance. (I originally embedded the video but I hate autoplay and for some reason couldn’t get it to shut off, and am not in the frame of mind for extended debugging.)

Now I’ll have to go find more. Which is probably why I resisted so long, of course; I didn’t want to have yet another time sink on my hands!

I haven’t been playing much Warcraft lately at least; I can’t get into much of the endgame stuff and I’ve gotten a tad bored of the leveling. Not to mention so many other people have dropped off lately due to boredom as well. If the expansion had come out at its original release date it probably would have been perfect; as it is it seems to be a bit late to avoid the boredom creep. Anyway, I’ve finally redone the rest of the level 70 dark shirt designs:

I also stumbled on an absolutely gorgeous piece of Warcraft fanart called The Winterspring Assault. Frankly it’s better than any official art out there!

Technorati Tags: cafe press, cafepress.com, ask a ninja, t-shirts, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

Today I reviewed The Chocolate Deck, by Lori Longbotham. If you see anything weird in the review do tell me; I’m a tad feverish today.

Also, since I was up at 2 am sniffling and waiting for the tylenol to kick in, I’ve been working on upgrading the level 70 designs now that I have GIMP to work with. Here are samples of the first few; more will come soon:

In some cases I’m changing the designs themselves, and in others I’m just creating dark-shirt versions that incorporate the designs now that I can do more with transparency.

I rather enjoy the regular “Carnival of Gamers” roundup of articles; take a look at the December feast over at MMOG nation. To quote Foton over at AFK Gamer (always a good read),

This Carnival is set at a holiday dinner with 27 different morsels for you to taste. Put those in your mouth, they’re delicious.

MMoGs, single player, Guild! Drama!, consoles, reviews, and advice — all available for free. We’re only missing your disgruntled relatives for the annual Airing of Grievances. Well, we’re not exactly missing them, are we?

The Carnival of Gamers is a nomadic monthly showcase of articles by gamers, for gamers and about gamers.

Well that’ll keep me busy until dinner time, so have a great weekend!

Epic Raiment of Holiday Cheer Dark T-Shirt

Technorati Tags: mmorpg, World of Warcraft

Honestly, I might not always agree with Foton over at AFK Gamer on specific opinions, but I like reading his arguments. After all the whining I see about every little thing whenever I log on to the game or read the official forums (”how dare Blizz change this tiny thing I liked even though it makes most of their players happier!” “how dare they make this tiny thing slightly less convenient for meeeeeee just because it balances play better!” “how dare they not fix MY list of pet peeves first!”) it’s just really nice to see someone who, sure, gets pissed at some of the changes, but who also has some perspective that not everything that bothers him is the end of the world. From Foton’s latest (NSFW language if you click through, depending on where you work),

White Text for Enchantments - annoying and momentarily panic-inducing, but shit happens. No biggie.

Arena Battlemasters Temporarily Unavailable - again, a nuisance but we’ll deal.

Honor System Revisions - there’s some creative spin going on in that thread. No great shakes.

Display / User Interface Issues - here we go. And where to start? Meh, I’ll get back to this.

Missing Bank Bag Slots or Items - this seems kind of huge. Hotfix incoming though, which is nice. Maybe if they weren’t trying to shove the square Beta code peg into the round Live code hole this wouldn’t be an issue, but what do I know about coding? Nothing, that’s what.

Level 60 XP to Gold Conversion, Display Issue - nuisance.

He gets the difference between things that are nuisances and things that really impact his gameplay. And he goes on to do a good job of explaining not only which certain things have had a large negative impact–and why, with examples–but provides a few sketchy ideas for how Blizz might minimize such problems.

See, now that’s constructive while still being a fun and entertaining rant to read.

Since I don’t raid, the whole thing has been a lot easier for me. I think my game has crashed once since the patch, but that’s it. I love that the rendering is smoother; now when there’s serious lag I still have a chance of moving through, say, the crowd out front of the IF bank. I also rather like some of the talent changes. I’m using the excuse to play around with some new UI mods to replace some of my old ones that hadn’t been maintained in a while.

Gotta say, though, my rogue waddles like a duck when stealthed now…

Crystal Water
Shirts, mugs, prints, ornaments, more!

Technorati Tags: Burning Crusade, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

Is it possible to be addicted to design? I never knew I’d end up having so much fun designing shirts & stuff when I first started that cafepress shop with my husband and our friend. I’d never done this kind of stuff before, and I’ve been stunned to see how well things have taken off (this month we hit the tier one volume bonus on THE FIRST DAY of December) and how much fun I’ve had with it. I’m getting more proficient with GIMP, although it still confounds me at times. It’s certainly helping me to design better items, even if the design takes longer. For example, the Epic Raiment of Holiday Cheer:

And of course, yet another new writers’ design, “write with curiosity:”

Among others. Yes, among others. Sigh… The Coffee mug of ultra-caffeination has also been selling like crazy, often 2-4 at a time.

Sure, it isn’t enough to live off of. But it supplements my husband’s income a lot better than the AdSense ads do, and it’s easier on my tendonitis than almost anything else I can do. It also dovetails perfectly with my ADD/bipolar/PTSD, because it’s easy to do in short bursts as the mood takes me, and I can apply it to almost any topic or interest–which means that restlessness and an inability to focus don’t keep me from accomplishing quite a bit. I pretty much despaired of ever finding anything that worked this well with my particular disabilities, so I’m going to let myself go nuts with it!

Technorati Tags: cafe press, cafepress.com, meerkats, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, writers, writing