Leafshine: Lust for Flower

Why The Black Dragonflight Are Dumb

1. Dude, Leafy's a healer. If she hacks and slashes the mobs just laugh…
2. Dude, she's a female. Wrong disguise, in so many ways. You can't even tell the difference between sexes? No wonder your dragonflight's in trouble.  

The Top 10 Leafy Posts of 2008

So, 2008 is done. It was the first full year of this blogs's life (I started in late 2007), and it's been a pretty good year, despite some very patchy posting in the summer, due to my Mum's death and some guild drama that followed it, and the end of the year, due to general exhaustion.

Interesting, this blog now has 50% more RSS subscribers than One Man & His Blog, my 5 year old main blog, but consistently gets lower page views. That suggest, I think, that the WoW audience is generally more web-savvy than the audience for material about the interaction of blogging and journalism. I'd like to see more people clicking through from feed readers and joining in the debates in comments on all WoW blogs, not just this one, but I've no idea how we can make that happen.

Anyway, onto the most popular 10 posts of 2008, ranked by page views:

1. Bloggers Against the Lifebloom Nerf - Back in February, druids (and those hoping to be healed by druids) were up in arms about a proposed nerf to Lifebloom. This was my rallying post to campaign against it, and we won. Eventually, Lifebloom did get nerfed, but as part of a complete revamp of our healing, so nobody minded as much.
2. Are Resto Druids up to Healing Heroics? - A really nasty Slave Pens run lead me to wonder wether Resto Druids were really up to healing Heroics, and the constant search traffic for this entry suggests that I'm far from the only person to wonder that. And then Blizz gave us a proper rez and another group heal, and the doubts went away.
3. New Wrath of the Lich King info - What About Druids? - Back in March I speculated about some nice things druids might get in the expansion. And people searching for info on Druids in Wrath kept arriving at my (wrong) guesses. Poor them. 
4. World of Warcraft is a Social Operating System - I think this was my best post of the year. A long, and considered (for me) post about the success of WoW, and the social factors that now give it a degree of stability in the top spot. Maybe I should write more serious, thoughtful stuff like this. :)
5. Guild Drama and Server Changes - Grabbing something positive out of the absolute low point of my gaming year. About a month after my mother died, some idiotic, socially-inept (and now former) guildies made it impossible for me to stay in the guild I co-founded. I ended up taking a couple of months on a different server - and, in effect, a couple of months off playing. That period of my life was so unhappy, even seeing that post again brings me down. 
6. Don't Nerf Trees: Thanks to Team Tree - a list post of all the bloggers who carried the anti-Lifebloom nerf badge.
7. Installing Wrath of the Lich king: What to Expect - I'm amazed to see this in the top 10. It's just a series of screen grabs of the install process for Wrath. The things people like…
8. Druids vrs BRK: First Blood - in which the weight of bear, tree and laser chicken brings down the Big Red Kitty server. That, or the dodgy bits in the Wordpress code. :)
9. Wrath of the Lich King Collectors Edition Unboxing - A video, which one of my guildmates recently described as "shit". The traffic figures suggest otherwise.
10. The Curse of the Enchanter - In which I complain about a mailbox full of material to disenchant, which WoWInsider than follows up on. It's interesting how few WoWInsider readers actually click through to source blog posts, though…

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, folks! And what better way to start the year than with a Leafy Ding?

Yes, in the depths of the Dragonblight, Leafshine hit 74 this afternoon, in my first real session after nearly a month away from the game. Next stop…

…Dalaran.

Is WoW Destroying Our Careers?

über-blog Boing Boing has posted something very worrying:

He replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc. I mentioned that some people have written about MMOG leadership experience as a career positive or a way to learn project management skills, and he shook his head.

It's disturbing that someone can take the worst stereotypes of WoW players, and discriminate against all of them because of it. I haven;t logged into WoW for over two weeks now, and yet I would face the same discrimination as an all-night raider? Insane.

It reminds me of the scares over Facebook in the workplace a year or so back - blaming technology for something that fundamentally is a traditional management issue.

A Tree in Paris

No, I'm not dead and I haven't quit WoW, it's just that the pesky real life thing has kept me from Northrend for 10 days or so now. However, it has sent me to Paris, where I found the perfect place for tree Druids to eat... :-)

Productive Weekend

First, I had one of these:

Followed, about half an hour later, by this:

Three levels down, seven to go… (And Dragonblight, here I come…)

Leafy's Fun Reads #2: Blogatelle

One thing I don't mention here very often is that I'm on a roleplay server. We partially chose that to get away from stupid name, and partially because a good proportion of the guild are roleplayers, some of us semi-professionally. But I have to confess that I don't do as much roleplaying in WoW as I might like to.

Blogatelle is a blog that makes me really, really wish that I did more of it. A multi-author blog that concentrates just on roleplay in WoW, it really challenged my pre-conceptions about how rich an enivronment for roleplaying the game actually can be. The group of authors mean that there's always something new in you feed reader and even if one post doesn't spark your imagination, another one will. Well worth checking out.

On Gnome Death Knights

Some people have ventured that gnome Death Knight are a bad idea, because they look silly and not at all sinister:

I beg to differ...