Saturday, November 7, 2009

A Laugh and a Half, but maybe you had to be there.

Most of the readers of this blog are fellow gamers. But there are a few who have no idea about this game. The introduction is for you. Everyone else can skip to the bottom two photos.

This is my character, Gimmlette, in the online game, World of Warcraft. She is a dwarf hunter class. That's my Core Hound, Huckleberry. There are several of this kind of pet in the game, modeled after the mythical Cerberus, guardian of Hell. Huck is from a place called Molten Core, where it's lava and fire and rock. One of his attack abilities is to breath fire. I got him because he's unique. Not very many people have a Core Hound as a pet. He's named Huckleberry because, well, extra rations of gruel if you can figure out why.

I've been playing since October of 2006. It's fun. It's what I do to relax. At the time this photo was taken, my character was at level 70. There have been two expansions, or additions, to the game since I started. The first took characters to level 70. The second, which came out a year ago, took characters to level 80, which is where Gimmlette is.

When I log into the game now, I have almost no challenges in terms of following what's called a "quest chain". One person will give you a challenge which, most of the time, leads to another challenge and so on. I have reached the stage where what I do is run "daily quests". As the name implies, they can be done every day for gold or something else. The pretend gold and pretend "Emblems of Triumph", for instance, can be redeemed for better armor or other things.

I come on and run 2 dailies in the capital city. Then in fly to a place called the "Argent Tournament Grounds" and pick up 7 more daily quests. They rotate among a selection. Some times, you can get the same quest several days in a row. That happened with the daily cooking quest. Ask me, some time, about meatloaf.

One of the daily quests from the tourney is to rescue a dwarf and 4 of his compatriots from this area just west of the grounds.
You are also to "off" 15 of the mobs holding his friends in cages. That's where I was on Friday when it got, well, interesting.

You see the small squares. Those are cages containing people who need rescuing. Mean baddies roam around this area and you have to kill them because they have the keys to open the cages. It's not just you doing this, however. You're also "enjoying" the company of any number of people who all have the same quest. Finding a live mob to kill can get difficult sometimes.

I was running around, with Huck, killing bad people, getting keys and opening cages. Another hunter showed up and tried to "steal" one of the mobs that I had targeted to kill. If you shoot or otherwise engage a mob before another person does, you get credit for that mob. There are people in this game who think nothing of running around tagging other people's mobs just to be mean. That's called "griefing" and is, technically, not allowed.

I don't know if that's what this person was doing. They had missed a couple of times to get a mob I had targeted. They ran to the right in the photo, near the edge of the area and attempted to hit another mob I had targeted. They missed again. So, to stop auto attacking, they did a maneuver called "Disengage". The hunter flies backwards. It's very useful if you get too close to use your bow or your gun.

Now you're all intelligent readers. You can probably see exactly where this is going. The other hunter didn't. He hit his "Disengage" and misjudged how close he was to the edge. All I have to say is, "It's a long way down." Your pet will disappear if you get a certain distance away from it. As I was laughing, his pet wolf disappeared.

Of course I've done it, not here, but in other places in the game. In fact, we've often talked about having all the hunters at the edge of a high cliff and the, on the count of 3, Disengaging over the cliff. The name of the guild is Spectacular Death for a reason. It would make an awesome recruiting statement.

I never got the person's name. I wish I had. I was going to send them an in-game letter telling them we'd decided to make them and honorary member of SD. That was just priceless. Fortunately, you're never obliterated in the game. You can run back and claim your body, assuming you can find it.

This area borders on a sea. I don't know if he would have hit the water from this ledge or if there is still land below. I just know that I was laughing so hard, I had to stop doing my quests for a bit.

Beverage: Robert the Bruce Scottish-style Ale

Deb

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