Congraturations, A Winner Is Ragnarok Online 2

A little less than a week ago, The Fiance drew my attention to Ragnarok Online 2.  Since I played Ragnarok Online back in my high school days on the EuphRO server, there was a momentary prickle of nostalgia-based interest, but that was quickly snuffed out by my desire to get my death knight to level 90.

“It’s free to play,” he pointed out.  With how amazingly my last experience with a free-to-play MMO went, this was not convincing me of anything.

“If you hit level 30 by June 1st, you get a special Founder title.”

Well, shit.

Despite how much fun I used to have with my friends crawling through 2D dungeons in the original Ragnarok, I honestly expected to play the sequel for about ten minutes before saying “meh” and going back to World of Warcraft.  We never got farther than level 10 in the first game, mostly because the terrible localization made understanding what the Hell we were supposed to be doing at any given time too hardcore of an adventure for a bunch of 15-year-olds.  I figured it’d be more of the same, endless grinding, right click to attack Porings until you vomit out of your eyeballs, blah blah blah.

Then I actually fired up the game, and my semi-long absence from blogging or doing much of anything has been because Ragnarok Online 2 is freaking amazing.  Or at least mostly amazing.

Ragnarok Online 2 launched their English-language version just on May 1st of this year, so it’s still pretty fresh out of beta, and with any MMO you’re likely to experience a few hiccups with the servers at the beginning.  I can’t speak as to server stability for the standalone client, since I chose to nab mine through Steam, but the first couple of days were riddled with connectivity issues that seemed to be exclusive to communication between Steam and the account service, Warp Portal.  The Ragnarok team, however, was quick to address these problems and has offered a couple of small freebie items from their cash shop to players to make up for the interruption, a move that’s especially awesome on their parts since players aren’t losing paid time from server outages.  From what I’ve seen of their community-facing team, I’m impressed.  I am slightly confused, though, as to why they’ve chosen to take the servers offline for regularly scheduled maintenance on Tuesday evenings, typically starting at 8pm and coming back up at midnight PST.  Blizzard also runs on Pacific time but handles server maintenance starting in the wee hours of the morning, when fewer players are likely to be on.  It just seems like a poor choice to me to shut players out during what could still be considered “peak” play hours.

(Admittedly, I keep referring to them as “servers” when there’s really only one server, Odin, broken down into 20 different channels which players can zone in and out of as long as they’re out of combat and not in a dungeon.  This comes in handy when trying to find a pick-up group for a dungeon or “elite” mob — I tend to do my regular questing in low-population channels so that I don’t have to worry about tons of competition for kills, but switch into the highest population channel to set up my personal shop and find groups.)

After the Scarlet Blade debaucle, it was really nice to go through a character creation process where the female characters were actually clothed, especially compared to what they typically end up wearing in fantasy games.  The worst I saw was a midriff top and short shorts that my character switches to when she’s crafting as a blacksmith, but since the game relies on an anime art style anyway, it didn’t seem out of place.  I’ve seen more offensive costuming in Sailor Moon.

45% more flesh coverage than the Sailor Starlights.

The whole game is insanely cute.  Even the “dusky” areas use a fairly bright color palette, and the monsters all look like something the children of Sanrio executives would draw on their school notebooks after snorting Pixie Stix.  I think the handpainted environment textures might actually be better quality than the ones used in World of Warcraft — the ones in RO2 seem to lack the distortion and pixelation that can sometimes occur in WoW.  The music was also a pleasant surprise; it can tend towards “generic RPG” at some points, but there’s a few parts of the score that feature gorgeous vocalizations.  I haven’t turned off the background music since I started playing it.  And how cool is it that you can actually select your character’s voice?  For a free-to-play MMO, they’ve definitely poured a lot of love and effort into the graphics and sound.

But therein lies the catch, right?  The game costs nothing to download, and there’s no monthly fee, so the cash shop must be full of game-breaking armor and weaponry that means “gg” if you can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money on it.  Except that’s not the case at all.  The Kafra Item Shop is full of vanity items like appearance-only costumes and mounts, with a couple of consumable boost items that are nice, but won’t wreck your game experience if you choose not to buy them.  The broken English descriptions, however, mean that making a purchase requires some very careful reading.  Occasionally you’ll find what appears to be two entries for the same item, but closer examination reveals that one is a 30-day item and the other is permanent.  One very useful item I’ve noticed is a Card Album, which will store all of the equippable stat boost cards you find during your travels without taking up precious inventory space, but it costs $5 and only lasts for 30 days — still cheaper than paying for a monthly subscription, but I feel like the value for the non-permanent items isn’t really at that cost level.

Now, as far as the English is concerned…

This wasn’t even the worst offender — I actually had to close out of that one immediately to prevent my brain from exploding.

The localization for RO2 is, to put it delicately, pretty bad, although a recent patch has introduced several fixes for the most noticeable mistakes, such as the now-ubiquitously quoted announcement of “Congraturations!”.  Many of the quest descriptions are useless when trying to figure out exactly where you’re supposed to go and what you’re supposed to do.  There’s a couple of quests that, on acceptance, drop a funny mallet into your bags that apparently you’re supposed to equip and use when killing the specified mobs… but the quest text doesn’t explain that part.  The mallet itself also does very little damage on its own and makes your typical attacks completely unusable, meaning you’re stuck auto-attacking and hoping that the mob’s health reaches 0 before yours does, which is occasionally impossible without relying on health potions in the meantime (side note: using a health potion turns off your auto-attack, something I didn’t notice right away the first time I got stomped into the ground).  When the terrible translations and missing information aren’t upsetting gameplay, they’re torpedoing the fairly decent lore that the Ragnarok series is based upon.  Character conversations that should advance the storyline in the player’s mind are instead stilted, confusing messes of generic statements that could be so much better with a few rewrites.  Coupled with the typical Korean game mechanics of “grind your face off,” it can make for a very dull experience at times.

There’s also the matter of certain NPC and city names not being kept consistent between the original Eastern release and its English-language counterpart.  Sometimes it’s just a letter or two apart, but several other times the names have been completely different, and only by making educated guesses and using the map to check for turn-ins can you guarantee that you’ll end up in the right place.  Some cultural differences have also not been accounted for — one of the first quests you’ll receive is to retrieve “wet crib sheets” for a fallen knight.  I’ve never heard anyone use the term “crib sheet” in this country to describe anything except what babies sleep on, but apparently it can also refer to schoolwork or notes on a certain subject.  Before I figured that out, however, I spent a couple of hours thinking that the knight got his ass kicked so hard that he wet the bed and that the game was calling him a baby for it.

A really neat feature I’ve managed to get addicted to is the way that RO2 handles titles and achievements, utilizing a system called “Khara”:

Also known as “We hate people with OCD.”

Unlike most games, where titles are strictly for vanity and/or RP purposes, here there’s actually a method to the madness.  Each title, which can be earned by completing Khara missions, offers different stat boosts to give your characters an extra edge.  In addition to receiving titles, most Khara missions also reward players with Khara points that can be used to unlock special missions, chunks of job or character XP, and money.  Some require reaching a certain level either with your crafting profession or your character themselves, while others ask you to consume a certain number of potions or kill specific mobs.  Accepting quests will sometimes unlock access to more Khara missions, as will leveling regularly.  They are inexplicably divided into “Episodes,” which correspond with absolutely nothing in the game itself, and with so many available missions figuring out what’s open for completion at the time can sometimes be a daunting task.  I’d rather see them separated into tabs by zone or mission type.  There’s also mild annoyance when a Khara mission opens up that requires you to backtrack and kill 80 of a certain mob that you had to kill anyway earlier on in the same quest chain — some streamlining is needed here to reduce aggravation.

Some of these Khara missions can only be completed in dungeons, which in this game cause me to grind my teeth simply because completing them and the regular storyline quests for each one require multiple runs.  Rather than asking you to kill a boss just once, the game forces you to run each dungeon at least twice for completion, and given the generic nature of each boss encounter, that can be mind-numbing.  Every boss I’ve encountered thus far requires the same strategy: don’t stand in shit, and kill the adds that the boss spawns.  Recent dungeons in World of Warcraft have been at the butt of plenty of “don’t stand in fire” jokes when it comes to their strategies, but RO2 takes monotony to a whole new level with their encounters.  Waiting until max level (at this moment, 50) and coming back to wipe out lower-level dungeons isn’t a possibility, either, due to the damage output and defense levels of bosses being out of balance with the strength and fortitude gained by players.  I don’t feel more powerful when I level in RO2.  Stat gains are incremental at best, and as in the case of Vitality, worthless at their absolute worst.  Each point spent in Vitality only gains 6 HP, meaning that in order to make a real difference in your character’s health pool, you’d have to sacrifice placing points in any other stat, which just doesn’t work.  These mysterious “points” are only granted each time a player levels up, with the number rewarded and the number required for +1 to a stat increasing over time, meaning that opportunities to beef yourself up are limited to begin with.  Crafting the best possible gear for yourself and augmenting your stats with the appropriate title and equippable cards are absolutely necessary in order to offset the lackluster baseline improvements.

With allocatable stat points also comes the chance to learn new skills, which rely entirely on the old talent tree model that World of Warcraft used to offer before switching to their weird Everquest 2 trees.  Localization again becomes a problem, with awkward and unhelpful skill descriptions that are enough to boggle the mind.  I sometimes feel like I’d be better off just downloading the Korean-language client and using Google Translate to try and comprehend exactly what I’m reading.  For example, the Warrior ability, Bowling Bash:

Which, coincidentally, appears identical to three other skills in the same tree.

Upon first reading the tooltip, it sounds to me that this ability works like a single-target Heroic Leap, when in fact it’s just another melee-range sword attack.  I wasted a skill point to find this out, and the only way to reset skill trees that I’ve been able to find so far requires making a cash purchase from the Kafra Item Shop, otherwise I’m stuck deleting the character and starting over from scratch.

At level 25, characters can change to one of two specialized classes that differ based on which class you chose to start the game with.  It reminds me of the Job system in Final Fantasy Tactics (although in RO2, “job” refers to “crafting profession”).  The problem is that there’s very few viable builds out there, and I’m not talking just for endgame — pick the wrong option, and you’re going to have a tough time just leveling by yourself.  My character started out as a Swordsman and transitioned into the Warrior class, which I assumed was the DPS build versus the Knight tank build, only to find that I’d gimped myself in a very big way by making this choice.  Instead of there being clearly defined roles for each specialization, it seems like there’s an Awesome Specialization and a Crap Specialization, and that’s about it.  I’ve verified this not only with my own playthrough, but also by talking to several more serious players in the game itself and reading through forum posts.  If your’e a WoW player and have ever tweeted Ghostcrawler with complaints about nerfs or insisting that your class needs a buff, come play RO2 for a few days.  You’ll be sending the man fruit baskets by the end.

Take whatever strength and survivability you can, though, because the respawn time for mobs is literally a matter of seconds.  Unlike World of Warcraft, which gives you a few seconds’ grace to run away from a mob that’s just popped on top of you before grabbing aggro, you’re fair game the second its model phases into the area.  Rather than mowing through pockets of mobs as you would in other games, it’s much safer to find one of the specific type of mob you need that’s far away from larger pockets and just spawn-camp the everliving crap out of it.  If you play a class without ranged abilities, such as Swordsman, you’re relegated to body pulls, which get dicey considering that mobs do enough damage versus your own damage output that using a health potion every 10 seconds is very nearly a requirement, and you’ll be stopping to regain health with regeneration foods every three to four kills in some places.  By the time you finish killing one mob, you’ve barely got enough time to loot it and run away to avoid aggroing a new spawn.  For this reason, questing can be a slow and nerve-wracking process.  The respawn rate doesn’t appear to be linked to how many players are in the area, since I’ve been the only one around on a low-population channel and still experienced the same near-instantaneous speed, unless it’s taking into account the number of players across all channels in that area rather than limiting itself to the active one.  It could also be the simple fact that most Asian MMOs tend to be more difficult than their Western counterparts; fans of that style of gameplay are undoubtedly pleased, but for the rest of us, it’d be nice to turn the dial down a bit from “holy shit” to “happy medium.”

In place of hearthstones for quick escapes to your home point, the Kafra Service NPCs located in most major quest hubs will allow you to select that city as your “Save Point,” accessible  every few minutes using a consumable Butterfly Wing, an item which they also will cheerfully sell to you for a nominal fee.  These same NPCs also offer personal bank storage which can be expanded with a real-money purchase from the Kafra Item Shop.  Transportation via flight point seems oddly expensive when compared to the rate at which Zeny (the RO2 version of gold) is earned, but upon further reflection, the ratio is no worse than World of Warcraft was back in the day of mounts at level 40.  Speaking of mounts, they’re available for purchase in the main city of Prontera at level 15 for 10 Zeny, which if my calculations are correct is equivalent to 100g in other games — rather than there being 100 rupees to 1 Zeny, it’s actually 1,000 rupees.  No special riding training is required, but there’s only one mount available, so without spending actual cash, there’s not much in the way of choice.  There’s also some sort of Food Bag sold by the mount vendor with a tooltip that claims it may make your mount faster, but I have yet to figure out how to use it to this end.

By this point, it probably sounds like Ragnarok Online 2 isn’t that great after all, but I can assure you that despite its flaws, the game has a lot of promise.  Just fixing up the localization errors and smoothing out some of the translations would make a huge difference in polish.  I commented to The Fiance that I wish they’d hire me, or Hell, even let me volunteer to sit down with all of the quest text, titles, and NPC names and bring them up to snuff, and I absolutely mean it — I see that much potential in the game.  I’d love to write a mod that fixes these problems, but I’m not sure that the built-in anti-hacking program would appreciate it enough to not permanently ban my account.  Thus far, I’ve been seeing daily updates and hotfixes to the game, meaning that their English-language team obviously has a great deal of dedication to and enthusiasm for their product, a feeling that’s definitely contagious after just a couple levels of play.  I stuck around for my Founder title, and to be honest, I don’t want to quit playing there like I expected I would.  It may not be a contender for World of Warcraft (at least not in the Western market), but it’s still enjoyable enough that I’m excited to keep playing on my Swordsman, and even to try out the other classes.

Especially if you’re a gamer on a budget, RO2 is well worth the download.  I’ve yet to experience another free MMO as well-crafted and fun to play as this, and I have serious questions as to if I ever will again.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children?

One of my favorite parts of World of Warcraft is getting to celebrate the holidays in-game.  It’s a week or two of festive decorations, chances at special vanity items, and themed fluff quests to serve as a distraction from the regular grind.  There are Azerothian counterparts for the major American holidays — Hallow’s End for Halloween, Pilgrim’s Bounty for Thanksgiving — and even versions of holidays from around the world, such as Day of the Dead and Chinese New Year.  Children’s Week runs during the same timeframe as Children’s Day, a real-life Japanese holiday celebrated on May 5th.  The questlines are easy; just take an orphan around the world, receive a battle pet as a reward, win.  There’s no grinding of tokens or special dungeon bosses to take out, no purple gear or mounts to drive yourself nuts over.  With the advent of account-wide pets, having enough alts means you can theoretically get all of the available pets in one year.  It’s the only holiday to have an achievement that encourages you to come back year after year, which I managed to screw myself out of by deleting the character who had 2 out of 3 already because I am just that smart.

For Children’s Week, players are tasked with taking various orphans for a whirlwind tour of the world, buying them small tokens of affection, and playing with them.  It sounds tedious, but it’s actually pretty heartwarming.  The Dalaran orphan quests lead you to the Bronze Dragonshrine, where they encounter a future version of themselves who has ascended to great heights within their communities, a reminder to us all that even if you come from very humble beginnings or lives of hardship, you can still accomplish amazing things.  In Orgrimmar (or Stormwind, if you’re rebel scum), the questline ends with the purchase of a rack of foam swords for all of the children living in the orphanage, who excitedly run around with their new treasures proclaiming your excellence.  I’m still waiting to find out what’s up with the Shattrath orphans, though.  Apparently Zaladormu and the other Keepers of Time know something about their future deeds, but they’re keeping mum on the subject.

The problem is that unless you know where to go in the first place, or just happen to stumble upon the quests, you’re going to miss out on all of it.  There’s no breadcrumb quests leading you to the three orphanages.  I’ve been playing the game for eight years and only this year did I find out that there was an orphanage in Dalaran that offered its own questline, which saddens me because I can’t help but think of the designers whose work is being missed thanks to this oversight.  Nor is there any kind of decoration that shows up in the cities to let everyone know that yes, there is a holiday this week, which seems like a missed opportunity considering the event’s Japanese heritage and the introduction of craftable origami creatures for the Inscription profession.  Mists of Pandaria, while primarily pulling from Chinese mythology, also shows some elements of Japanese and Korean influence; using some of the decorative lanterns and kites already added to the game could make sprucing up the cities easy.

The addition of a Pandarian orphanage would also be great here, not just for sake of keeping up with the expansions, but also from a lore perspective.  How many Pandarian children have found themselves orphaned since the parting of the mists and the violent battles against the Sha?  Character models for these orphans would be easy, since Pandaren are a playable race for both Horde and Alliance.  The same could be used for both, or the difference could be as subtle as different colors of clothing.  There’s certainly tons of important landmarks in Pandaria itself that could be used in the questlines.  Here’s a quick and dirty example of what the chain could look like:

Children’s Week
Offered by: Matron Geum-Ja (and yes, that totally is a Sympathy for Lady Vengeance reference)
Objective: Use the Pandarian Orphan Whistle to summon your orphan.
Turn-in: Orphan

An Inky-Dink Operation
Prerequisite: “Children’s Week” completed
Offered by: Orphan
Objective: Take your orphan to walk on the mystical waters of Inkgill Mere.
Turn-in: Orphan

Doin’ Fine At The Shrine
Prerequisite: “Children’s Week” completed
Offered by: Orphan
Objective (Horde): Take your orphan to the Shrine of Two Moons.
Objective (Alliance): Take your orphan to the Shrine of Seven Stars.
Turn-in: Orphan

Just Tillin’
Prerequisite: “Children’s Week” completed
Offered by: Orphan
Objective: Take your orphan to the market at Halfhill.
Turn-in: Orphan

I Wanna Go Fast
Prerequisite: “An Inky-Dink Operation,” “Doin’ Fine At The Shrine,” and “Just Tillin’” completed
Offered by: Orphan
Objective: Enter the Sky Race with your orphan.
Note: This is done like the “Ridin’ the Rocketway” quest in Azshara, where the player enters a cloud serpent vehicle with their orphan out and the two are taken on a scripted flight path around the racetrack.
Turn-in: Orphan

It’s Bugging Me…
Prerequisite: ”An Inky-Dink Operation,” “Doin’ Fine At The Shrine,” and “Just Tillin’” completed
Offered by: Orphan
Objective: Take your orphan to meet the Klaxxi at Klaxxi’vess and buy them an Amber Figurine.
Note: Amber Figurine purchasable from Klaxxi Quartermaster only while this quest is active.
Turn-in: Orphan

Back To The Orphanage
Prerequisite: “I Wanna Go Fast” and “It’s Bugging Me” completed
Offered by: Orphan
Objective: Return to Matron Geum-Ja with your orphan.
Turn-in: Matron Geum-Ja

The reward for completing the entire quest chain, in keeping with the spirit of the other Children’s Week lines, would be a choice of battle pet:

• Cloud Racer Hatchling (Lv. 1 Dragonkin, uses this character model recolored to white)
• Baby Panda (Lv. 1 Beast, uses this character model)
• Carp Kite (Lv. 1 Magic, a carp-shaped kite to represent the koinobori traditionally associated with Children’s Day)
• Baby Crane (Lv. 1 Flying, uses this character model)

Of course, the design team has their hands full right now with the upcoming 5.3 patch and future storyline patches to expand our Pandarian adventures, so it’s likely that deviating from those deadlines to update a once-a-year event with new content won’t be happening anytime soon.  That being said, I’ve got my fingers crossed that they take a moment to re-evaluate School of Hard Knocks, an achievement required for the For the Children meta-achievement which is, in turn, part of the significantly larger What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been.

It seems like I’m not the only one out there bemoaning this achievement, either.  I somehow managed to get it completed back in 2009, but The Fiance is playing through the Children’s Week content for the very first time and I’m finally able to see what a colossal time-sink and pain in the ass it really is in its current incarnation.  It’s standard for the holiday meta-achievements to include at least one PvP achievement, which I think is only fair; after all, designers have to cater to both the PvP and PvE players out there as best as they can in order to keep either side from feeling neglected.  The problem is that the objectives for this particular achievement leave both camps out in the cold.

Let’s look at the PvPer’s plight: during Children’s Week, the required battlegrounds are inundated with inexperienced and undergeared players who are only in there to get their achievement.  The players who are there to earn honor and who are actually concerned with victories have to spend this entire week gritting their teeth and expecting a string of losses.  I was watching when The Fiance entered a battleground and was promptly kicked because he had his orphan out.  Simply put, the general attitude coming from the PvP group seems to be “we don’t want you here,” and I understand their frustration.  It’s the equivalent of trying to do a raid and having the other 24 members show up in greens without having read any boss strategies beforehand.  Does it excuse the insults and harassment being flung around?  No, not at all, but tensions are definitely running much higher than normal this week.

The Fiance is not a PvPer.  He had fun doing the easier battleground achievements in Winter’s Veil and Hallow’s End, but he isn’t interested in PvP otherwise.  He doesn’t have a PvP set or spec.  He plays on a PvE server because he wants to avoid PvP situations as much as possible.  Without basically being carried through each objective, he has zero chance of being able to complete the achievement.  Instead of making progress, he’s being called every nasty name in the book, singled out by the opposing faction, excluded from groups where he might have the opportunity to get the achievement out of the way… if Hard Knocks wasn’t required for the metas, he wouldn’t even “inconvenience” the PvPers by entering their battlegrounds to begin with.  But he has his sights set on the Violet Proto-Drake mount, so his only option is to either keep trying and failing, or giving up altogether.

School of Hard Knocks should not be removed from the requirements.  The holiday events already have a strong lean towards PvE, and just as there are many PvE players who would rather eat their own hand than enter a battleground, there’s plenty of PvPers for whom having to do regular quests or any kind of PvE content is a slow, agonizing death for their enjoyment of the game.  Including a PvP element for them is the best way to throw them a bone that doesn’t involve the addition of an entire alternate line of achievements that cater to their preferred play style — it’d be cool to have both PvE and PvP paths that lead to the same end, but would require a great deal of work to implement.  The trick here is to simplify the objective itself so that it is still enjoyable for PvPers, but not completely out of reach of those who choose to focus on PvE.  Currently, for completion, a player needs to summon his orphan and:

• Capture the flag in Eye of the Storm
• Assault a flag in Arathi Basin
• Assault a tower in Alterac Valley
• Return a fallen flag in Warsong Gulch

These are all highly-specific events that can quickly become impossible when you’re fighting against 29 other players to complete them.  There aren’t enough opportunities in a single 15 vs. 15 round of Eye of the Storm to capture the flag.  Some serious teamwork is required in order to make these happen, and while Blizzard as of late has been trying to encourage social play and working together within the game, it’s a lesson that’s just not sticking.  Whether it’s because we’re all jaded after eight years of play and have, in turn, caused even newer players to exhibit that same malaise when it comes to being considerate, or perhaps due to the lack of accountability for one’s attitude that seems to have tagged along with the implementation of cross-server groups, expecting an entire battleground to “play nice” has sadly become a mark of naivete.  Without being lucky enough to find a pre-made group specifically going for the achievement — I keep seeing this suggestion, but have yet to actually see it implemented — there’s just no way it’s going to happen.

If the objective were changed to something much more general, such as tasking the player with winning 10 battleground matches or getting 100 honor kills with their orphan present, there would still be an element of challenge and dedication required in order to complete the achievement, but it would be much more accessible for non-PvPers.  It would put it more in line with the difficulty level of G.N.E.R.D. Rage or With A Little Helper From My Friends, a welcome change from its current status as the hardest PvP achievement required for any of the holiday metas.  PvPers might even see some of their frustration alleviated as the focus shifts from completing specific tasks within the battleground itself and more towards playing to win, meaning that even those who usually are PvE-only will be putting their best foot forward to ensure victory.  Until these tweaks are made, however, I feel bad for The Fiance and all of the other players who will be kept from receiving their proto-drake this year because of this single achievement.

 

Children’s Week is pretty enjoyable in its current incarnation, but with even the most minor of changes could still be better.  Much like the orphans we’re asked to take care of, all it really needs is for someone to remember to come and visit it from time to time.

 

 

 

Tardbunny And The Podcast Extravaganza (And Some Other Words About Words)

Today I was present as a guest on LowPopWow’s sixth episode, which focused on community-building.  It’s available for download/listen on their Twitch channel, and should be uploaded (along with a few other episodes) to Stitcher and iTunes fairly soon!  I really enjoyed the experience a lot — it was a much different interview style than I’m used to, extremely structured, more like an actual panel at a convention than anything.  Practice, maybe, for the future?  Hathorr is a fabulous host with a voice that’d make any NPR broadcaster feel woefully inadequate.

About halfway through our recording I got an email from Ghemit of the Let’s WoW! podcast asking if I could fill in for his co-host Dae for the evening, since real life apparently crit her for like 74692764 and prevented her from being able to do the show.  How could I turn down an offer like that?!  Though Dae was sorely missed, we had a great time with Rongar of Hearthstone Cast fame talking about Hearthstone and what excited us all the most about its impending release, as well as delving into the wonderful world of roleplaying in World of Warcraft.  There’s a rough/temporary version of it up on the Let’s WoW! Twitch channel, though Ghemit will undoubtedly have it up on Podbean, Stitcher, and iTunes within the next couple of days.  He’s an industrious sort like that!

I really can’t wait to do more podcasting.  I’m toying with the idea of a “Let’s Play”-type Twitch channel for myself, where I could really go through all of the various zones and instances and apply a designer’s perspective to them, highlighting details, bugs, et cetera, but in the meantime, I’d love to be back on LowPopWow and Let’s WoW! again!  There’s also a laundry list of other podcasts I’d love to be a guest on, and I’m hoping that in the very near future I’ll have more announcements for everyone about my guest appearances!  And maybe I won’t be all hopped up on Nyquil by then!  (Seriously, I am so sorry to anyone who had to listen to my gravelly/more nasal than usual rambling today.)

I actually did a little bit of listening to the recordings today and was somewhat disheartened to hear that the aphasia I’ve been having to deal with as a side effect of my old medication hasn’t resolved itself as completely as I thought it had.  There’s a few instances where I can hear myself struggling for words, slurring my speech, and flat-out using the wrong verbage.  Aphasia is a neurological issue that messes with the speech and/or language centers in my brain and occasionally makes me sound like a dolt, something I certainly don’t need any help with in my day-to-day life.  Imagine being onstage in front of a thousand people and without ever having read the script, so you have to think as fast as you can to cover up for it and ad-lib your way through the play you’re in.  You’ll probably get some of it right, but you’re also going to screw up a bunch of it by spouting off random nonsense because to you, it sounds like it maybe fits the scene.

That’s a pretty complex analogy, I know, so here’s an example: I want to say “I insist upon it,” but what comes out is “I exist upon it.”  The word is close, but definitely not correct.  I know the definition of “insist” and “exist” and if you asked me to write the sentence down on a piece of paper, I could do it perfectly.  It just gets messed up when it goes from my brain to my mouth.

I know that it’s not something I can really control, so I shouldn’t be upset with myself, but it’s a terribly embarrassing issue to have.  Those not in the know usually think that I’m a.) drunk or b.) unintelligent and trying to sound smart by using words I don’t know the meaning of.  When I slur the pronunciation of a word, most people will laugh and ask “You mean ___?” and though I’m pretty sure they aren’t trying to be dicks about it, I want to cry every time.  I know how the word is pronounced.  My brain is just not cooperating.  And should I have to stand there and struggle to come up with a word, they just assume I’m not paying attention or that I’m an airhead.  It’s common for people to not be able to think of a word once in a while.  For me, it’s more like I can’t think of any words because part of my brain has just decided to turn all the lights off for a while.  As a writer and hopefully soon-to-be game designer, it’s mortifying, because good communication is part of the job description.  I am a good communicator, I really and truly am, especially when it comes to writing, I just have a temporary setback right now while the damage that the Lamictal did to my body and my mind undoes itself.  Trying to explain this to people and desperately hoping that they’ll understand and not hold it against me is a terrifying thing.

The aphasia gets worse when I’m under stress, tired, or taking medication that spaces me out, such as — you guessed it — Nyquil.  There’s always a certain level of anxiety I deal with when verbally communicating with people, mainly because I have to think a little harder to sound “normal.”  On top of that baseline, this weekend my mother managed to drill through her hand while working on a DIY project which resulted in an emergency room visit, one of the mice passed away of unknown causes, and just this morning I was startled awake very early by a crashing noise in the living room that ended up being the cat getting into the mouse cage and killing another of the mice, who happened to be the sweetest, cuddliest, most loving of the bunch.  My weekend, as you may have gathered, has been a fairly large pile of shit, not even counting all of the sleepless nights and highly uncomfortable days I’ve spent before that with The Plague.  It’s like a perfect storm of failure on my end.

I’m not trying to make excuses or get pity, more that I’m troubled by it to the point that I really feel the need to explain myself and maybe educate a few people here and there on some of the weirder things that can go haywire with the human brain.  And to a degree, I think I just need to talk about it for my own sanity rather than trying to pretend like losing partial control of my faculties doesn’t scare the everliving crap out of me, even if it is a problem that should eventually go away on its own.  But until it does, purple monkey dishwasher, I suppose.

Tardbunny On LowPopWow… And At Blizzcon!

Sunday, 4/28 at 2 PM PST I will be a guest on LowPopWow for their community-building episode!  It’ll be available for download shortly thereafter, but LowPopWow records live using Twitch.TV, so come hang out in the chat and give us your questions if you want them answered on the show!

And in even more exciting news… I’m going to Blizzcon!  The Fiance and I will be there for the whole weekend as part of our Geeky Honeymoon Extravaganza, since we get married earlier in the week.  We won’t be staying at a hotel as far as I know, since we don’t live terribly far from the convention center and also I know the hotel is going to be full of drunk noisy people and nothing turns me into a crotchety 83-year-old woman faster than people making noise when I’m trying to sleep.  (Reason #72368632 why I probably should never reproduce.)  A tiny part of me is kind of regretting not getting married at Blizzcon.  I mean, Blizzcon and Disney World are about the only two places that could be even cooler than getting married in front of the orc statue on the Irvine campus.

Which reminds me, we send out the invitations in like two months which means I have that long to find a venue with a budget of $0.  YAAAAAAAAAAY!

I Am Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired

Two days ago I woke up with a tickle in my throat, and by tickle, I mean “it felt like I was drinking straight out of my hot glue gun.”

As a kid, I used to get violently ill around the same time every year, which mystified doctors until I was about 11 or 12 and one of them finally figured out that I have an oddly specific allergy to a certain type of mold that grows on certain types of citrus trees during the harvest season in a certain region of the United States, and as coincidence would have it, we had three of said moldy citrus trees chilling in our yard that would start bearing fruit at exactly the same time that my respiratory system started re-enacting The Exorcist.  Now that I’m an adult who maintains at least a 50-mile distance between herself and the nearest orange grove, I don’t really get colds or flus or anything like that.  When everyone else is being obliterated by whatever Zombie Swine Chupacabra Plague happens to be sweeping the world at the time, I’m sitting at home watching the advisories on CNN and making smug faces.  On the extremely rare occasion that something does manage to force itself through my mucous membranes, all Hell breaks loose.  The way I see it, I get all of my requisite sniffly stuff out of the way in one shot every five years or so.  I’d rather be sick as balls for a week and then not have to deal with it for like a million years, you know?

At least, that’s what I tell myself until I actually get sick.

But more about Hot Glue Gun Throat Syndrome.  It’s about the worst feeling in the world.  You go to bed and everything’s great, then you wake up choking on all of the terrible booger-y shit that’s decided to jailbreak out of your sinuses and down the back of your throat.  I’ve got a high pain tolerance — I actually fell asleep during my tattoo because I got bored — except when it comes to throat pain.  I would take a papercut to the tongue over a sore throat.  I’m not sure if I hate it so much because it legitimately hurts, or because it’s always a harbinger of doom for my immune system.  Some people know they’re getting sick when their nose gets runny or their left third metatarsal starts throbbing; I know I’m completely and utterly screwed once I get that constant drowning sensation.

I spent that entire day frantically chugging every source of vitamin C I could find, because unlike a normal person, I actually go through the stages of grief when it comes to getting sick, and here was Stage 1: Denial.  I hit Anger upon finding that my herbal chest rub had gone a bit off, meaning I spent the rest of the day smelling like I’d been rolling around in menthol cigarette butts (as opposed to regular butts, which I would love to roll around in).  Within another couple of hours I was Bargaining with Azazel and every other major and minor denizen whose name I’d heard on Supernatural that if they’d just, like, cancel this delivery of Extreme Suffering I’d sacrifice an entire herd of alpacas in their honor.  Depression and Acceptance hit about the same time once I realized that I was almost out of Supernatural episodes to watch and laid down on the couch in utter defeat, at which point I didn’t so much accept my plight as tried to get back up and nearly threw up everywhere so I really couldn’t fight it anymore.

It’s amazing how the crappy things you hate doing when you’re healthy suddenly become all you want to do when you’re confined to bed.  I like to pretend that I’m this ironically lazy creature like Garfield except actually funny (and also lasagna tastes like Silent Hill and broken dreams to me), but the reality is that nothing drives me further up a wall than a wasted day, especially now that I’m out here in Irvine and actually have the desire to do stuff.  There’s also that tiny little detail of “every day that I don’t work on writing or practicing my coding is another day I don’t add to my portfolio and an even longer delay with getting hired at Blizzard” so between my type A personality kicking in and a built-in biological warfare system, I haven’t been the easiest patient to deal with.  I technically shouldn’t even be sitting here writing this for multiple reasons, the least of which “it’s by far the stupidest thing I’ve ever written” and the most important being “The Fiance is going to realize I’m not laying down and come into the room and make loud annoying noises at me until I go back to resting.”  Yes, The Fiance has pretty much ordered my complete quarantine to the point that I’m not even allowed to get up and get myself a glass of water.  I made my own lunch this afternoon and I swear the little shit gave me the evil eye.  But I’m an independent person, and thus being told “no, you are coughing up globs of brown things, you cannot do the laundry” without being allowed or able to yell “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED” afterwards is one of the least sexy tortures that a person could inflict on me.

Not to mention that I’m just flat-out unused to being able to take time off to recover from an illness.  Before my short stint at the tea shop, I had a job where we were legit not allowed to call in sick.  Ever.  We were so under-staffed and over-worked that one person not showing up could mean the difference between hitting our deadlines and getting hopelessly behind for a month.  My former significant others were not always the most sympathetic people.  I ended up bedridden for a week with a nasty case of food poisoning and my boyfriend at the time accused me of faking it so that I didn’t have to do housework.  I learned not to rely on people for care while I’m sick or injured.  The Fiance, meanwhile, brings me medicine, food, drinks, extra pillows, blankets, and kisses to the forehead without me even having to ask for them.  He’s stepped up to the plate by taking over all of the housework with exactly zero complaining about having to do so.  If I try to protest or do something anyway, he very gently takes it out of my hands and ushers me back to the couch.  He isn’t cranky with me despite the fact that my coughing and tossing-and-turning has kept him up for three nights straight (and when I offered to sleep on the couch, he refused to let me even think about it).  My Jewish guilt can’t handle this kind of spousal excellence, I swear.

If there is a bright side to being sick, it’s that I’ve managed to catch up on Netflix and regained my ability to do a bitchin’ Dr. Girlfriend/Dr. Mrs. The Monarch impression, although my Skeletor and Eric Cartman are currently suffering.  The fact that my sinuses are so tightly packed with rainbow colors of snot and other nastiness means that I can actually consume foods I wouldn’t otherwise enjoy, so finding something to eat is easy as the pie that we sadly do not currently have.  A cat peed outside of our window last night and while it was a horrible experience for The Fiance, I just sat there blissfully ignorant to the stench.  I have an excuse to not shave my legs for a week.  I get all the tea I can drink (even though I’m not allowed to make it for myself).

And then I cough up something that tastes vaguely like bug spray and I just sort of sigh and resign myself to another three or four days of being an observer of the chaos rather than an active participant.