We’ve got a Newgrounds day for you today!

For those of you who have never been, Newgrounds is a website that used to be devoted entirely to flash artists – games, animations, that sort of thing. More recently, they’ve also added the ability for artists to upload instrumental music.

Many of the more popular games and animations and whatnot tend to find their way to Newgrounds, if not originate from there. I may actually be referencing this site relatively often for ICYMI, but here’s some for you guys to check out today:

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Welcome to ICYMI 2. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

Parkour (and also Banlieue 13): Parkour is something you may have seen before, but didn’t know it was something of an organized activity with a large following. It was developed by a guy named David Belle, who served in the French firefighting response unit, but also had a lot of experience in athletics, gymnastics, and all sorts of things that basically help develop you into a goddamn ninja.
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An idea I’ve had for a long time while contributing to Saate.net is making a regular feature called “In Case You Missed It,” where any time I think of things I’ve seen, or run into new things, that I think are interesting or at least very much worth your time, I could just make a little collection and comment on them. Well, I unfortunately haven’t been writing them all down, but here’s some to get you started:
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So earlier this week, I happened to do ICC 10 on a Tuesday night with 4 friends and 5 PuGs. We got 10/12 done in one night, and I managed to get a new iLevel 251 mace out of it for my rogue. Given the new weapon, I decided to swap over to a combat build.

Now, my rogue is currently wearing 4/5 t9, 4 pieces of 232 gear, 1 piece of 219 gear, 4 pieces of 245 gear, 2 pieces of 251 gear, 1 piece of 264 gear, and 1 piece of 226 gear. I don’t use gearscore, but I’m on a server that is obsessed with gear, so I happen to know it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 5100. I happen to have a smattering of PvP gear, as well, about 600 resilience or so. Not great, but not terrible. I don’t do arenas, and I haven’t done more than one raid with the character so far.

Now, with all that in mind, I did all this in one day, in this order:

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While recently researching how to properly gem my mutilate rogue, since I hadn’t played it since about December or January (and even then, it was primarily for PvP), I couldn’t find a response that didn’t involve the phrase “get a spreadsheet.”

It took me about 2 hours to download, comprehend, and then get all my gear put in (since almost half of what I was wearing was not included with the gear list). I did notice, however, that there was an option to toy with raid buffs and whatnot and see how it would affect your expected DPS.

So I decided to toy around and see what would give the biggest DPS increase – better gear or raid buffs?
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Also Known As: Why Spelling and Grammar Matter On The Internet.

OK, so we don’t really know that many people who type things like that (as much as it may seem like it), but there is a much more common phrase I see on almost any forum or place of public discussion. Generally it’s when someone fails to write in the English language to the point that you actually have to slow down your reading because your brain is busy making heads or tails of the message instead of just browsing through it.

“lol dis not english test speling dosnt matter”

This is primarily an attitude that has cropped up with “the texting generation,” for which I feel embarrassed to be on the border of. Might I offer the following thoughts about texting (fair warning, it’s from the Boondocks, so if you are easily offended by language… Well, what are you doing reading one of my posts, anyway?):
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So you’re an ICC raider, eh? You say you hate how long it takes to get the Gunship started after everyone’s on board?

Then, I CHALLENGE YOU, SIR! How many times can you bounce in the air without landing using the gunship’s rocket pack? Keep in mind, most guilds probably aren’t going to wait around for you to get your best, so do it right the first time!

Here’s my best, so far:

Let me begin with the assumption that if I say RealID, everybody knows what I’m talking about. Now just in case you no speaka da English you don’t keep up on news, let me link you to a few articles so you can get yourself caught up on what the hell is going on.

What the @$#% is RealID

RealID for the forums

Whoops, no RealID for the forums

You back? Great.

So to summarize, Blizzard is very aware of this concept, courtesy of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins over at Penny Arcade:

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As I’m sure some of you have noticed, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted up a podcast or a video. I’ve been working on a new guide along with Saate and a few others using GoogleWave, but I’ve also been making raid videos for my current guild.

I’ve also been playing Tetris.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, often making a video can take several hours for only a few minutes’ worth of information, so I’ve been really trying to find a topic I feel passionate enough about to basically spend the entire day working on a presentation for.

Unfortunately, while I’ve had a few ideas to kick around, I haven’t really come up with much – part of the reason is that I feel somewhat obligated to make more and more impressive visuals, and I often just don’t quite feel up to the task. For example, I recorded a few flawless heroic Halls of Reflection runs that I’d done with PuGs as a holy priest, and was considering making a quick H HoR guide. But then I wondered if it was really something people would particularly care about – it might be mildly interesting, but is it something people would sit and watch for 15-20 minutes?

I’m going to be very upfront here and just let you guys know that I’m a feedback whore – I tend to be more enthusiastic about working on creative projects when I feel confident that I will get feedback about them. So I’d love to hear what you guys are interested in seeing.

Anyway, Saate brought up an interesting idea to me, and since I may still go with it, I’ll keep it a surprise for now, but suffice to say that one of the ideas I had to go with his suggestion was to basically poke fun at how reliant everybody has become on AddOns to play WoW.

I currently raid with a guild that wants to make it policy that in order to raid, you must have DeadlyBossMods installed, and if you’re capable of removing important debuffs, you must use Decursive. This isn’t an uncommon request from many guilds, and this kind of mindset that you can’t play WoW without certain AddOns is pretty prevalent.

In fact, if you go to the Shaman forums, almost every thread asking for advice on how to play the enhancement spec will have somebody telling the poster to get an AddOn called Shockandawe. If you go the druid forums, almost every thread asking for feral DPS advice will recommend getting Rawr. For shadow priests, it’s MFClip. For all healers, it’s healbot coupled with grid.

Someone demoing MFClip for shadow priests:

Now personally, I believe some AddOns can be genuinely useful to the game. Things that make repetitive tasks easier (Gatherer for example), or that change how things are displayed so that you more easily notice important information (various UI AddOns) are, I think, a good addition to the game. Blizzard tends to incorporate the more useful ones, like ScrollingCombatText. Most bosses even come with raid warnings on their “you’re all about to die” abilities, vis-a-vis DeadlyBossMods.

But something makes me feel very angry about AddOns that “play the game for you,” as it were. Many of you are probably familiar with the DBM feature that whenever you’re standing in fire, an alarm will sound and the big bad wolf will yell, “RUN AWAY, LITTLE GIRL! Run away…”

I think Blizzard has done a very good job of incorporating most of the “necessary” AddOns into the game by now, and I’ve yet to participate in a raid encounter that I was not able to hold up my end of the slack with just the default raid UI. In fact, I’ve often been asked “what AddOns I use” in some of the instructional videos I made, like this one (fair warning, it’s old and outdated!), even though I don’t use any:

It used to irritate me to no end when I’d be a raid leader for Naxx 25, and our tank on Maexxna would die because the poison debuff wasn’t getting removed. That wasn’t even what irritated me, though, it was that, when I’d ask why it wasn’t removed, the response would be, “My decursive isn’t working.”

I’m all for AddOns making the game more convenient to play, or perhaps making some aspect of your life easier, but it bugs me just how many players have become so reliant on AddOns that they actually are unable to perform without them. To me, it’s like someone never learning to do simple calculations because they could just have a calculator do it for them. “Sorry I couldn’t get out of the fire. DBM didn’t tell me to.” And yet, these AddOns are often accepted as so necessary that you can be kicked out of raids for not having them!

Don’t even get me started about AVR.

So what do you guys think? Is it a bad thing that people have become so dependent on AddOns? Is it important that people learn how to play without them before they start customizing with them?

Zevia’s back from a trip to California!

While I was down there, I happened to reconnect with a lot of former guildmates from a guild on Kil’jaeden called Astrum Brumalis. Most of my raid leading and guild leading experience came from being a part of a guild called ASM on Vashj, and a number of the officers relocated to Kil’jaeden and joined Astrum Brumalis.

While many of us don’t play WoW any more or only play sporadically, the guild leader, Hojowameeat – also known as Mike – happens to do a podcast with a couple other officers from the guild. They were kind enough to treat me to a guest spot on their 5th episode on my last day before flying back up to Seattle so make sure to check it out!

Here’s a direct link to the MP3 (right click, save-as):

Some topics discussed (among many others) include:

– What everyone’s been playing recently
– Gamers and piracy
– Star Trek Online
– WoW
– Downloadable Content

Enjoy!