It’s early in the young life of Inscription, and like Jewelcrafting and every other crafting profession, it has a barebones feel at the outset. There’s one point in particular that’s giving me grief as I work my way up to the highest levels, and I feel like it’s easy to fix.

The problem is that simple communication regarding which glyphs are easy to get (learned from trainer) and which ones aren’t is impossible. There are three ways to learn glyphs:

1. Many Major glyphs are learned at the trainer.
2. Every Minor glyph comes from a low-level daily research (Minor Inscription Research).
3. The best Major glyphs come from a Northrend-level daily research (Northrend Inscription Research), which is fairly expensive to do because it uses lots of Northrend herbs, which are farmed into oblivion at the moment.

All of these glyphs look exactly the same to customers.

Currently, there’s no way to communicate to non-scribes that the glyphs that I’ve worked hard to unlock (at great cost) are any different than the ones that every Scribe alt has. When I announce,

“Glyph of Chain Heal for sale!”

…there’s no way for anyone to know how fantastic and tough to learn this particular glyph is. I have to count on the customer to go out and do research as to whether this is readily available or not. Of course, most people don’t–they just assume that I’m charging too much and that someone else will offer it soon. (which is unlikely, given the high cost of research and random nature of discovery). So I end up sitting on glyphs that are fantastic because my customers don’t understand that these glyphs are different than the other ones.

This is why the glyphs that result from Northrend Inscription Research should be rare (blue text) and the glyphs from Minor Inscription Research should be uncommon (green text).

I’m not saying that the effects should be buffed, just the appearance. You know instantly when a tailor, leatherworker, or blacksmith has spent an extra degree of materials or effort because the item has green, blue, or purple text. You can even tell for enchantments, if the enchanter links the recipe to you. Why can’t we get some of this action for Glyphs?

As far as benefits to the Scribe go, the primary one is a low-cost, superior shoulder enchant. For example, my healer will have the Master’s Inscription of the Crag as soon as I get something which will hang around for a while. It’s certainly functional in zomg number terms (compare with Lesser Inscription of the Crag and Greater Inscription of the Crag available via reputation) but it’s not very… exciting. I mean, that and the books is it, and using the books preclude using a staff. (not a problem for me, but it does reduce the utility of the item)

Overall, a slow start.

My wife reminds me that Jewelcrafting started off slow, too, then added trinkets and BoP special gems (and rings) that eventually made the profession a lot of fun. I’m keeping that in mind while I’m looking forward to what’s coming for this profession.

These words are from Groups of Words: Improving Inscription

• Intro to Using PvP gear in PvE
• Expansions are the Great Reset
• Geeky Game Design and Automated Character Audits
• There is no healing spreadsheet
• There are Many Ways to Win

Don’t just lurk nearby while people kill the mobs, though. If you’re not busy skinning, go ahead and help kill some of the mobs that someone else has tagged. You’ll feel good, and the faster the mobs die, the more you have to skin. Good for them, good for you.

What’s more, those mobs also happen to be the best mobs in the zone as far as skinning goes. Before you know it, you’ll have a couple of stacks of Borean Leather. (Don’t be freaked out by the scraps; it comes so fast that they turn into real stacks soon enough).

Enjoy!

These words are from Groups of Words: WQ: Alliance Skinning Tip

• Dynamic Duos
• The Pleasant Surprise
• One week with patch 2.4
• MMO Expansions and Sequels
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Variety vs Specialization

However, I’m playing a lot of WoW and I really want to do is talk about the cool and strange things I’m seeing, even if they’re just small articles. So I’m going to do so! I’ll preface these shorter thoughts with WQ.

Feature articles will be returning shortly.

These words are from Groups of Words: Wrath Quickies

• Some GM Advice
• Achievements are not account-wide
• Guilds are not Businesses
• The Offseason
• Expansions, Side Projects, and your Guild

Every alt-invite request from a person with guild bank access should come directly from that character’s main.

This vulnerability exists all the time, but in this brave new Death-Knighted world, alt invites are going to be rampant.

GOOD:

OfficerMain: “Hey, I just made a DK alt, name is OfficerDKAlt. Can I get an invite?”

GM: “Yeah sure!”

Officer logs off of OfficerMain, logs on OfficerDKAlt, receives invite, gets promoted to guild bank access. Nothing bad happens.

BAD:

RandomPerson: “Hey, this is YourFriendOfficer. Can I get an invite?”

GM: “Yeah sure!”

RandomPerson receives invite, gets promoted to guild bank access, empties guild bank.

From the looks of it, Blizzard’s going to have its hands full with technical problems, so help yourself out and prevent this from happening to your guild.

These words are from Groups of Words: Protect Your Guild Bank with an Alt Invite Policy

• Some GM Advice
• Minipets are now weightless joy
• Polytoons can be Bad
• Officers should all have Tanks and Healers
• Historicity and WoW

(checking)

Then you start hoping for a minor win, like maybe just the server with your opposite-faction alts to come online? It doesn’t have to be the server with your mains–I mean, your alt server would be better than nothing. As if hoping for a personal lesser goal will allow that server to magically squeeze through the authentication server and appear on the realm select list.

(checking)

I mean, I could read all the WoW-blogs I’ve subscribed to, but then what would I do during work tomorrow?

(checking)

These words are from Groups of Words: “No, it’s totally healthy.”

• My Compulsion is Infrastructure
• Definition: Main vs Alt
• Intro to Using PvP gear in PvE
• Everything is Always Moving
• Guild Strengthening via Personal Achievements

There’s a second, much smaller shift that happens as well, for both the people who have been playing all along and their guild’s leadership.

When you’re in guild leadership, you try to pay attention to the kinds of people in your guild. If you’re in a raiding or arena guild, you need a certain number of players of a certain build and gear level. If you’re in a casual guild who tries to be family-friendly, you need to know that the people in your guild respect that. The social dynamic of your guild is determined by the people who are vocal and play a lot. Running jokes tend to include these people, content gets run with them, and even the roster can start to be shaped by their presence.

Everyone makes a big deal about people joining and leaving a guild, and it’s true that this is a big deal. But to guild leadership, who is active is just as important than who is tagged with your guild name.

Now, many players have just one guild. The guild is their game experience. This kind of player is easy for the guild leadership to manage: when that player logs out with one toon, they’ll typically log in with another guilded toon and only the name change needs to be accounted for. Given that MMOs are a time-heavy style of gaming, if you have access to all of someone’s characters, you have access to that player.

In my experience, some fraction of the playerbase has a game experience that is more than one guild. In fact, there are many different ways to manage multiple characters:

• one guild, multiple guilds, or unguilded
• all on one server or across multiple servers
• all in the same faction or across multiple factions

…and of course, any combination of the above.

When a given content level is in play for long enough, it becomes easier to manage multiple characters, even if those characters are in completely different situations. Let me explain.

In my casual raiding guild, I know that a couple of the players are side projects for players in highest-end raiding guilds. After a while, the characters in these guilds can only be improved by further raiding. Those players enjoy the vibe of our very friendly guild for just hanging out and “light raiding every now and then.” In the long dead time between highest-end raid instances being released (and conquered), they spend most of their non-progression-raiding time (that is, most of the time) in our guild. Even though their highest-end raider is in another guild.

Now don’t get me wrong, they’re not gearing up the character with the intent of ever leaving (the “levelling guild” stigma). Each of these characters are in that character’s permanent home (my guild), but each player doesn’t spend all their playing time on one character. They play enough to participate in multiple communities at the same time. For these people, when a new highest-end raid instance comes out, these players mysteriously vanish for a while as their raiding guild attacks the instance with fervor.

Likewise, I have a number of toons in the same guild, but another unguilded toon who I farm and run battlegrounds with. (When I was an officer, I needed an unguilded steam valve) My wife and I also have a completely separate horde alt side project, which I’ve mentioned in passing before. On that server, we’ve consciously avoided joining a guild there in part because we know that we wouldn’t be there but for our own whim, even though we’ve met some very friendly people there. However, if we had joined a guild, that guild wouldn’t see us for a few months (at a minimum) after this expansion comes out.

So what’s the common thread?

While characters are bound to one guild, players are not bound to one character.

When there is new content available for a character, it becomes especially attractive to play that character, to the exclusion of others. While this doesn’t affect a character’s relationship with a guild, it does affect the player’s relationship with their character. Namely, every other character hibernates when new content comes out for a character that you consider higher in priority. In fact, every time you log in with a character, the others are hibernating. The content/focus relationship is just the running trend.

(Yes, this invalidates the whole main/alt definition. It’s a continuing area of interest.)

The broader the new content reaches, the more likely that a given person’s side project will be affected, and therefore the more likely that someone in your guild will be touched.

When the new content is as small as a new reputation grind becoming available, a profession change, or the release of a single new instance or raid, the odds aren’t as high. In this case, a player will just play their other characters a bit less, as in the examples above.

Alternatively, when the new content is as large as a raised level cap and a completely new set of instances/raids and revamped skills and expanded/new professions and new pvp content and and and… in that case, every single character of every single player has new content available and new goals to pursue. For example, the humongous Wrath expansion coming out next week!

In this case, one character will be chosen to hit the expansion content first. Therefore, expansions mean the temporary hibernation of every side project.

The side projects who are members of my guild (and every other guild) will appear to vanish, probably without a peep. People who manage toons on multiple servers will basically go back to being single-server players for a while.

Given enough time (between three weeks and four months, depending on the player), people will go back to spreading their play time around, and likely rekindle the relationships that surround that character. But at first, they’ll be playing their favorite character pretty heavily, and the communities around the hibernating characters will have to adjust to their absence.

For guild leadership, it’s a mixed bag. They smile at the flood of players returning to the game, perhaps picking up some recruits and keeping their guild healthy by doing so. But meanwhile, a couple of people on the roster–maybe well-liked members–will silently vanish during one of the most exciting times to play the game. The excitement of the expansion content means that this will be overlooked, but it’s strange and it does affect the social dynamic of your guild.

Do you think you’ll see this happen? Keep an eye out and let me know.

These words are from Groups of Words: Expansions, Side Projects, and your Guild

• Expansions are the Great Reset
• My Compulsion is Infrastructure
• Definition: Main vs Alt
• Polytoons can be Bad
• Maximum Performance Isn’t Always Maximum Fun

I logged on late the other night to hopefully luck into a quick instance run (didn’t happen), and there were four people from my guild on. I didn’t recognize any of them. I vaguely remembered reading someone’s app from a little while ago, but that’s all. I mean, I’ve seen them around, but this is the first time I had ever logged in and not known anyone who was online.

“Well, new guildies are good for the guild,” I thought.

However, these people were chatting with each other over /g, and they all seemed to know each other pretty well. Even though I didn’t know them, it was obvious that each of them was a good fit for the guild. We have a strange and fun guild culture, and it was obvious that they were steeped in it.

It felt like walking into my living room and finding four very friendly strangers there.

I immediately went to the guild application section of our forums… and was shocked to learn that I hadn’t checked up on it in quite some time. Turns out that these “new guildies” had been in the guild for four months, not just a couple weeks. None of them were new at all, I simply had yet to spend good time with them in my random, new-parent-constrained playtime.

Time changes when you become a parent. I’m grinding rep at work harder than ever (supporting family = playing for keeps), spending as much good time with my wife and daughter as I can, keeping in touch with my friends… I’m trying to wring every last second from each day. Activities of relaxation, like playing MMOs, used to take up a lot of time for me. Now those opportunities to relax aren’t as common. Days are so busy that they blend together.

The weird thing is that my view of the guild and my friends in it had been like a photograph. Static. Unchanging. I’ve been playing and having fun and then logging out with the following message, “See you soon!” because it’s what I’ve always done.

Soon used to mean tomorrow, or even later today. Now, soon can become a week or two without even realizing it. (Wasn’t it just Monday yesterday?)

Now I log back on, and while time hasn’t moved for me (I feel like I was just on), to my friend who’s been on every day, I’ve been gone.

“Wow, it’s great to see you! How have you been?” says my casual friend.

I try to come up with what I’ve been doing in a way that’s not too personal, or uncomfortable. I think, “Well, my daughter has been chewing on the coffee table hard enough to leave marks” and then “Her digestive system doesn’t really seem to dig green beans” and then “I got a really painful and yet beautiful pang of joy when she screamed and cried as I left to go to work yesterday morning”.

But instead, I say, “I’m good! How are you?”

“Well, I didn’t get the drop I was hoping for and I still can’t find the minor doodad I want (do you make them?) and…”

And I smile. The reality is that:

• Guilds are dynamic
• The people in these guilds are dynamic
• The game itself is dynamic

Everything continues to move, even when you’re not watching it.

I guess that the funny thing isn’t happening to the guild… it’s happening to me.

These words are from Groups of Words: Everything is Always Moving

• The lure of large-group raiding
• Raiding vs Parenting
• WoW and me
• Guilds are not Businesses
• Expansions, Side Projects, and your Guild

Wired: Awesomely Bad Defense Trinkets, Part II

…and thought, “A WoW theorycraft article in Wired?! Is this a parody or…?”

It’s funny, because of course the word trinket existed before WoW. However, in the last three years, I haven’t seen that word once outside of a WoW context, while of course I’ve heard it many times in WoW.

Thus, trinket has been completely co-opted in my mind, and I will now have to translate back to normal English every time I see it. Grats to Blizzard on successfully hacking my basic language skills and pointing them back to their subscription game.

And so, my submission to the imaginary version of the above article: Direbrew Hops. It’s zomgepic, but it won’t help you tank anything.

These words are from Groups of Words: Game Terms Overcome

• Geeky Game Design and Automated Character Audits
• Disconnectors: Internet Impaired or Pug Menace?
• Playing Around
• Raiding does not mean Skilled
• Hellgate London sucks

You log on. It’s patch day! None of your addons work. There are all kinds of new toys and changes to enjoy, and you can’t wait to explore the content.

At some point, you travel to a major city.

Goto 2.

2

You are in a major city. There are other characters all around you, doing normal in-game things.

There are seven posts in trade channel:

“Where the hell did all my Doodad 1 go?!”

“Where can I get New Character Enhancement?”

“gg on so much server downtime, omfg”

“LFG multiplayer content”

“WHERE IS NEW THING”

“My Doodad 2 got deleted!!!1 I’m filing a complaint.”

“What is New Game Mechanic?”

If there is someone online who would like to kindly correct the internet, goto 3.

If there is someone online who would like players to do some amount of reading, goto 4.

If you’ve seen the question “What is New Game Mechanic?” ten times, goto 10.

3

The kind person answers the question. The original poster says thank you. Or not.

If you have noticed the person looking for multiplayer content twice already, goto 5.

Otherwise, goto 2.

4

The geeky gamer says,

“Go read the patch notes.”

If there are many people of this mindset online, goto 7.

Otherwise, goto 6.

5

That person gets tired of trying to penetrate the repetitive patch droning, stops asking, and goes off to do solo content.

Goto 2, replacing “LFG multiplayer content” with a new and different person saying “WTB cool new Thing”, then a new person saying “WTS reagent for Thing”, then another saying “WTB reagent to make Thing”, then start over with one saying “LFG multiplayer content”.

6

The conversation continues:

“Jeez! Why not just answer the question?”

“Because people are going to log on all day and ask that question.”

“It only takes two seconds to answer the question!”

“If I’m mean now, maybe the person will read the patch notes that they clicked right past to get into the game, and next time they won’t clutter up trade chat.”

Goto 9.

7

The Internet Dickwads appear from nowhere and pile on:

“whatever NOOB!”

“ya rly nub go nub somewhere else nub”

“rtfm”

“go die kthxbye”

“w/e stfu cuz you have crappy welfare epics”

“diaf bbq moron”

“I’ve always hated you, Bob.”

If the Dickwads start infighting and completely lose sight of the original point, goto 12.

If there is an extroverted person online who was bullied as a child, goto 6.

Otherwise, goto 9.

8

Many parties proudly declare that their opponent in the argument is a complete waste of everyone’s time and effort to read, so they’re reporting that person for chat abuse and/or putting that person on ignore.

You /facepalm in your heart that they announced this over the same channel.

Goto 2.

9

The conversation continues:

“This is a game, it’s not homework.”

“Why don’t you just take five minutes instead of asking everyone on the server to do it for you.”

“If I wanted to read, I’d watch the ticker on the bottom of SportsCenter. I just want to play.”

“Then keep your ‘just playing’ out of the damn global trade channel.”

Goto 12.

10

You just can’t stand see this conversation play out again.

If you turn off trade chat and stay in the city, goto 13.

If you leave the city, goto 13.

11

After glancing at your chatbox, you say to yourself, “It’s been over two hours and this conversation is still going on?!!”

Goto 10.

12

The conversation spirals out of control just like every other argument between strangers on the internet, for example:

“I pay my fifteen dollars a month and I can use trade if I want to, it’s called Freedom of Speech.”

You can replace it with any other typical weblog comments, forums, or irc lunacy you’ve ever seen, invariably leading to one of the following:

• Religion
• Politics
• Science
• Faith
• Nazis
• Yo Mamma

Goto 8.

13

You have left the city-chat network and are blissfully exploring the new content! It’s a good thing the Massively part of MMO isn’t mandatory.

If you stay on this character, you win! Enjoy the new content.

If you later log on an alt, goto 11.

These words are from Groups of Words: Choose Your Post-Major-MMO-Patch Chat Adventure

• The Offseason
• “No, it’s totally healthy.”
• Drama is Inevitable
• Disconnectors: Internet Impaired or Pug Menace?
• Cooperative multiplayer overview

“What are all those Horde characters?!” she said.

“Oh! Well, here’s my auction house alt, and my grinding alt, and–”

“I thought this Horde thing was a side project?”

Blink blink. “It is.”

“Are we giving up our Alliance toons?”

“No! But we’ll need support for our horde mains, too.”

“Our L32 mains?”

“We’re going to need gold for epic mounts and–”

She didn’t actually say anything to interrupt me, but her look cut me off. It’s the “you’re missing the point” look.

“Um… yeah,” I said.

She’s right, of course. Without even realizing it, I had begun duplicating the entire infrastructure that I have in place to support our Alliance mains. Crafting alts, auction house alts, and so on. That blink blink above is my brain suddenly becoming aware of a pattern I hadn’t seen before.

I mean, these horde characters are going to be left behind when the expansion comes out, maybe even sooner than that. And even though I know that these characters are going to be left behind, and perhaps never touched again… I’ve learned so much about this game, how to make some parts much easier by expending a little effort in non-obvious ways, that I can’t help doing so. I have to apply that knowledge. I need the infrastructure in place.

And so I log onto my horde auction house alt while I’m bleary eyed in the early morning, and dutifully peck at the AH to build a reserve of gold for epic ground mounts.

Just in case these characters ever get to that point.

After explaining it in this way, my wife understood perfectly. After all, her rogue was a max level Jewelcrafter on day one of the profession’s release. That was fun for both of us, from researching and planning through painful grinding of mats right up to the hour of glorious implementation. When the gates of Outland opened, everyone rushed Hellfire Peninsula. We rushed Exodar, because that’s where the easiest Jewelcrafting trainer is. We stood next to a couple of other people who did the same thing. The fellow crafters all smiled at each other, sharing an understanding of the moment without speaking. Their friends or guild or family or even just themselves would not want for a Jewelcrafter, not one day. Their infrastructure, what they felt they needed to be successful in the game, would be in place.

Likewise, my priest will be a max level Scribe (Inscription) on day one of that profession’s release.

In the past, I’ve scoffed at people who race to max character level, bypassing what I consider to be the beautiful leveling process. In truth, I’m just like these people–I don’t share that compulsion, but I have a couple of my own: the gold one, the crafting one.

Do you have a game compulsion?

These words are from Groups of Words: My Compulsion is Infrastructure

• Expansions, Side Projects, and your Guild
• There are Many Ways to Win
• MMO Expansions and Sequels
• Maximum Performance Isn’t Always Maximum Fun
• Guild Strengthening via Personal Achievements