I gotta say: I knew I was joining a good guild when I got back from retirement. They'd just killed Putricide and Sindragosa and were starting on heroic Lich King that week.

But, seriously, two days of raiding? 8 hours a week?

Congrats Skunkworks on your Heroic Lich King kill (we're recruiting a DPS/tank DK, by the way.)

Most weeks we got at most an hour of Lich King on Tuesday, meaning there was just a day of progression, so we never ever used up all the attempts available. To make matters worse, a couple weeks ago we were totally screwed because the server was down all day Tuesday.

Now, we freely acknowledge that the ICC buff was huge -- but I also don't think the ICC buff is as significant on that fight as it is for, say, Festergut or Rotface or Saurfang. Defile doesn't change its timing, and you still need to get valks to line up. It's a bit more forgiving because you have higher valk DPS, but you still need to master the mechanics: which is hard when you have 4-5 hours of progression per week.

I've opined on this in the past but: when I joined Fusion, it was five days a week: but back then all the big guilds were doing 7, so five days was kind of a big deal. Unfortunately more and more people dropped to fewer days and it lost a lot of that "plucky guild doing the best it can" feeling for me.

Skunkworks has it though.

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In a rather startling announcement, Blizzard posted today saying they will reverse the decision to use real names in SC and WoW forums.

This was pretty darn awesome news to wake up to, and I really would like to commend Blizzard for acknowledging it and backing off. I really didn't expect them to do so, at least not so quickly.

However, I wish they would've extended their "understanding" back one step further and acknowledged that requiring your full name to be exposed to friends and friends of friends just to use their cross-server chat and cross-game friends system isn't a good idea either.

The only arguments that apply to the forums but don't apply to the in-game system are that forums are an existing feature, and forums are searchable. All the other concerns about unique names, people "friending" all women, and transgender people apply.

It's a shame Blizzard only backed down as far as PR forced them to, rather than stepping back, examining the whole system, and asking "Are we doing the right thing here?"

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To assume — as Blizzard seems to have assumed — that anonymity enables only "ugly speech" is the product of a failed imagination. Anonymous speech has always been an integral part of free speech because it enables individuals to speak up and speak out when they otherwise may find reason to hide or self-censor. Behind the veil of anonymity, individuals are more free to surface honest observations, unheard complaints, unpopular opinions — incidentally, all healthy contributions to an evolving gaming community.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/07/new-blizzard-forum-policy-will-require-posters-use

Reading this survey on American's opinions about the internet and privacy, you would expect most people to react very negatively to the RealID fiasco at Blizzard.

But that's not what you find, even in much of the (internet) media.

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A compilation of some of the better links and quotes about RealID:

Update (July 8th):

What can you get with just the first and last name of Blizzard employees? People paid well enough to be able to afford to pay people to keep information off the web (yes, there is an entire industry to do this.)

Find out: http://asnowstormbyanyothername.blogspot.com/

To be very clear: do not do anything with the information there. Odds are under 1% that even a single person on that page (other than Kotick) thinks this is a good idea. They're private citizens, like you are. Don't take out anger on the wrong people: submit your complaints to Blizzard, post, talk to newspapers -- but don't engage in what a friend termed "e-terrorism."

Blizzard forums

The poster of this was deleted/banned after making it, but not before the post got leaked other places:

Got in touch with my ex-flatmate, whose sister works as a GM for Blizzard, to see what the internal buzz on this was. Apparently, at the moment the employees are largely as pissed as the players, and she stated that despite attempts to keep it hushed, it has become known that the big creative players within Blizzard are pretty much as unhappy about this as we are.

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From: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=13816898018&sid=1

Addons can expose your RealID name even if you haven't made any RealID friends.

If you're concerned about this you have several ways of responding:

1. Don't update your addons (they won't magically start broadcasting your RealID without you updating it)

2. Turn off RealID in parental controls
3. Don't worry about it unless you tend to download a lot of "off the beaten path" addons where the author would be willing to risk their reputation by putting in code like this

As annoyed as I am at this RealID thing, the API call existing is sort of a given: if you couldn't get RealID information with API calls, you couldn't write any mods around it. Blizzard likes mods. We like mods.

Addons before could have, if they wanted to, broadcast the name of all your alts to everyone and created some massive "this person's alts" list to prevent people from hiding behind level 1 trolls.

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Answer: "The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID -- that is, their real-life first and last name -- with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm."

Worldwide, fansites look on with glee as they think about the increase in advertising revenue as players flee the official forums.

Speaking as someone who posts on the forums and has only EVER done so on my main (and a well-known main at that), I will never post again.

This isn't driving accountability, it's driving people away.

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Halion is now available as a boss in Stratfu.

I hear Midwinter has a video with vent available of 25-man heroic, so that should be posted soon.

So this isn't too short an update, here's an amusing snippet from StratFu IRC earlier today:

[12:47] Feist: also someone is looking for a Beastcleave, Dispell cleave, 
Spell cleave, TSG, PHD, or African Turtle Cleave 3's team.
[12:47] Feist: African Turtle Cleave?
[12:47] Feist: whut?
[12:51] GemGee: Perhaps 2 Warriors shouting like Vuvuzelas and one Hunter 
with a big red turtle?

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This is where I reveal I got an alpha invite...

There's a post on the alpha forums announcing the start of closed beta, as well as the alpha NDA being lifted. Apparently the alpha forums are also visible to everyone (and weren't deleted this time, like in past years.)

Unfortunately, while I was able to comment on a lot of quests and the new races, mages have seen almost no changes in alpha so far.

Hopefully we won't see a repeat of WotLK where mage changes were so late that some weren't even tested before going live.

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Unfortunately I haven't been able to answer any questions about Fusion for quite a while now, but I do know that as of when I last heard, they are committing to continuing to raid through Cataclysm (which isn't a given in guilds these days!)

This is a very long post, apologies in advance.

I've been meaning to write this update for quite a few months now:

In a few words: I burned out, quit for a few months, came back in a far more casual (but still serious raiding) guild, raiding only one third what I used to, in a more adult/professional/family-oriented guild: people who also can't do 22+ hours a week. (and not-an-officer, yay!

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Tired of having to hold two different WoL windows next to each other to see how well you did compared to someone else?

Miss the good old WWS "compare everyone in this class on this fight" screen?

Seriallos, of Kamigami, created CompareBot to make it even easier to evaluate yourself or your applications with WoL:

CompareBot

Put in a couple URLs from parse details, wait for it to fetch the information, and then check out a side by side comparison of how you did against someone else in your guild or someone in one of the top guilds in the world.

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