The Looming Patch

So tomorrow, WoW is getting severely changed around. Sort of like what they did to Star Wars Galaxies before I quit. This is different, though. People are excited. Hell, I’m excited. I’ve been way bored with WoW lately, and when I play, I’ve been chasing achievements. Blew up 5 bombs in a battleground. Did all the quests in Zangarmarsh. Spent several hours grinding reputation. Things like that. Part of me wanted to use this time to wander off and find a better clique, but my troll won out, and I decided to focus on making her the best troll ever. I’m trying to hit 8000 achievement points by Cataclysm, and I’m less than a hundred away.

I mentioned that I was going to write something about what I’ve gotten out of all these years of WoW, and I kept going off on these Big Idea tangents.

One thing that did occur to me is brevity. Long ago, I decided to do my IT help desk tasks while using the fewest syllables possible. That’s because walls of text scare and intimidate users. I’ve carried that on to other areas, like WoW. Where if you say “don’t stand in green” your chances of succeeding peak, compared to “excuse me, I don’t mean to be presumptuous by giving you advice, but the green stuff on the floor makes your health bar turn into a popsicle on a hot day, and if I have to choose between letting the tank drop and sacrificing you, o lazy hunter that can’t be bothered to move a few yards to the left, well, I’ll see you in the afterlife.”

So anyway, my Minimal Syllable Rule has been finely honed in WoW, and at the same time, it’s been great for my career and personal life, although maybe it’s cut down on my blogging some. Convey information in as tight a package as I can wrap, without a bunch of useless cultural signifiers and dominance-submission games and honorifics clouding the waters.

And the best of my Big Ideas had to do with aggression. WoW, and actually the whole internet combined with aggression, is sort of like the invention of reliable birth control and sex. For the first time in human history, we have a way to exercise a primal and innate drive without necessarily doing life-changing things to others.

My generation dealt with aggression the way the Victorians dealt with sex: treat it as some unnatural foreign impulse that should be conditioned right out of us (thus leading to many impassioned hippie editorials about how we should censor violence, not sex). More current generations spend a lot of time simulating killing each other and then laughing about it. It’s my opinion we, as a species, would benefit greatly from learning more about our tendencies toward aggression, and how to satisfy them in harmless ways.

I’m still playing Sims 3. My Sims are vexing me lately. In my painstaking effort to recreate my Sim-Fu master Long Wang, who was killed in the great hard drive failure of 2010, I discovered that one of the skins I had downloaded – through the official sim site – was writing copies of a couple of ladies’ outfits to the guys’ and kids’ files, thus resulting in random men with huge gazongas or toddlers with scary distorted adult torso meshes floating above them and no chests of their own. The last straw was when little Long was born with a strange mutant fleshtone, thus screwing up all that work it took to get his mother to seduce that Chinese guy long enough to conceive him.

So I did a major search and destroy through my downloads while cursing the noob customizer who inflicted this upon me. At least with previous versions of Sims I could just go delete the offending file, but nooooo, Sims 3 makes you deal with the launcher interface, and won’t really let you go poking around in the files to see which one is getting on your nerves.

THEN, I discovered that a couple of sims I had created inadvertently used custom skins. When I deleted the downloads, they turned an unappetizing shade of . . . charcoal. After some internet research I found the only way around this is to either (a) download a 3rd party hack that lets you change things like that, or (b) make the sims over again.

Sims 3 keeps interfering with my enjoyment of Sims 3. I feel like I’m spending more time recreating stuff that’s gone bad. My current family keeps having an audio bug where a couple minutes after loading, either all the sound cuts out or some annoying background sound – crickets, passing cars – loops. Why do I keep attempting to play the wretched thing? Well, on the rare occasions when things are going smooth, it can be very entertaining.

Hopefully the WoW patch will be smooth too. Let’s cross our fingers.