Project Lore

It Looks High Due To Gnomish Relativity, It's Actually Only 3 Tauren Lengths Failing in World of Warcraft is a common occurrence.  Perhaps you lagged and that mob got a lucky crit in before your heal/potion/Vanish/Feign Death went off.  A terrible right mouse button misclick may send you plummeting to your death.  Maybe your greedy self finally got burned by a Pickpocket resist.  Failing isn't only a normal occurrence, but one that can come in many shapes, sizes and varieties.  The most hilarious of which is failing epically. My personal definition of failing epically has a pair of possible meanings.  The first is the inability to do something gimmicky, such as the numerous Super Mario Bros. type of deaths (Frogger (mobs after him), Safety Dance, Chilly Willy, etc).  The second is exponentially more painful.  Not only does it include yourself dieing, but you take someone with you, by accident.  The idea of an accident means sitting on a hunter who popped Feign Death to save on a repair bill does not count as an epic failure.  That is just endlessly hilarious and entertaining. A few examples of epic failure include Thaddius wipes, allowing people to die in Maexxna's web, allowing the tank to beat you in the DPS meter (assuming you are full DPSing), and rolling anything but a female dwarf.  I am by no means perfect and have been a part of these shortcomings along with most of the WoW populace, but I personally added a new category to the topic of doing things incorrectly, Lemmings.

During a quick run of The Nexus everything was going quickly and smoothly until I decided to take a shortcut.  After dropping Anomalus like a bad habit we headed towards Ormorok's wing.  I decided to cut out the middle man and jump from the ledge rather than taking my time walking down the ramps.  "Look before you leap" is an intelligent colloquialism, wrong ledge.  As I plummeted to my death I hit my push-to-talk button to allow my guildies to hear me laughing at my own stupidity.  When Solidsamm went *SPLAT* another maniacal laugh cut across my own, followed by another *SPLAT*.  The mage mistook me for someone who knew what I was doing, and followed me to the bottom of The Nexus.  I had managed to create Gnome Lemmings! No one is perfect, but we all love embarrassing stories so that is one of mine.  What other ways have you failed epically in WoW?  Remember, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. As for the PL dungeon crew, we want a blooper reel!

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During this week's raid, an odd thing happened.  Something that has never happened in my entire MMOG career.  The event was shocking enough to leave me speechless.  Literally.  In the middle of our run through the Military Wing of Naxxramas, the Ventrilo server kicked the bucket. For those of you who may not know, Ventrilo is a popular voice chat application that many players and guilds utilize for communicating while playing WoW, among other games. Once the raid realized that the issue was guild-wide rather than personal, the chiding set in. "Looks like someone forgot to pay the bill." "The economy is so bad that even the Ventrilo hosting companies are laying people off!" "This guild can't kill Sarth + 3D or even keep their Ventrilo up?!  I am outta here," followed by a joke /gquit. The server went down during the early trash of our second wing of the night.  After a slight pause to let the Warlock admin reboot the box, we moved on.  We were at pre-Instructor Razuvious trash, so no worries.  Who wipes on trash, right?  I don't know if it was the distraction, the need to type again or random chance, but we nearly had our first - and what would have been our only - wipe on the second to last pack of Death Knight Cavaliers.  The raid pulled out of the lengthy skirmish with a healer standing and a few DPS.  Thankfully, things shaped up after that. Once the initial excitement and near wipes dissipated, an unusual calm set in.  Macros were patched together in haste for boss fights, tanking and stun rotations were set way in advance to compensate for the inability to voice our directions (Yes, I know WoW has built-in voice support now, but I don't know a soul who uses it).  The adaptations allowed us to continue on for the night, but holy crap was it an entirely different experience. I and many other guildies never realized how boring a raid would be without the pointless banter.  No more mom/girlfriend jokes to distract us during trash.  No more lore quips about Thaddius and how he is composed of women and children.  And political/religious chat?  Who the hell would want to type all of that stuff out?  None of my guildies, that's for sure.  Normally the GM has trouble shutting people up, but Ventrilo goes down and even text-based conversation drops to a minimum.  Damn, I should have done /tumbleweed.  I am sure that would have got a few laughs. Have you ever had to suffer through a Ventrilo-less guild raid?  It is one thing to be a part of in a PUG (and usually, you are smarter for not signing on that Vent).  But when you aren't conversing with people you know, the game certainly loses some of that social aspect.  It was one of those eye opening experiences.  You will never realize how much you enjoy Ventrilo until it is randomly absent.

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