Blog Archives
The Name Game
Thanks to Z and Cinder’s Blog Challenge, I have content! If only I would have done this back when the challenge first came out, like weeks ago. My bad!
The challenge was thus:
“How do you come up with character names?”
My answer is simple – I tend to let others come up with names.
No, I don’t have an army of monkies mashing away on typewriters to crank out names for my WoW toons. Not that that wouldn’t be cool because it would. It would also be filthy, what with the flinging of poop that monkeys tend to do when they’re not working in the typing pool.
My first few toons had the typical Warcraft names. Actually, they had typical Everquest names since I was trying to copy the characters I had over there. But after awhile, I got sick of rolling my face across the keyboard and calling it a name. I wanted to be clever. So I did what many do – I went to my favorite things outside the game and tried using those names.
I had three typical go-to’s when it came to finding names. It was either comic books, mixed martial arts, or fantasy novels. I quickly discovered that the fantasy novel thing was a dead end, because either all the good names were already being used, or they were outright disallowed. Bummer.
Mixed martial arts was an interesting source for me. Here are a bunch of men and women, like Terminators, bent on distraction …. but in a sportsman-like way. Marketing is big with these particular athletes since they don’t really make the cash you would think a person should get for beating someone unconscious / twisting their limbs in unnatural directions. They have to be somewhat marketable for sponsorship and so on. Ergo, nicknames!
Naturally some of these names are going to be pretty creative. Some of them, like Nick “Fainting Goat” Thompson (now just “The Goat”), clearly comes from a mind that has taken one too many doses of blunt force trauma. But some of them, especially ones in another language, make for good WoW names. I had a goblin named Napao, which is Portuguese for “Big Nose”. Got that from a human wrecking machine from Brazil, Gabriel Gonzaga.
Not that I’m calling him a goblin. Not to his face, anyway. Not even to his picture.
But generally, my best source material has usually comic books. Of course, good luck getting any of those in-game. Like Fantasy Novel characters, they are already taken (most likely due to a creative use of obscure icons or an interesting spelling) or they’re just not allowed (because facing a Marvel lawyer is a RL boss that nobody wants to tank). I’ve gotten around this by combining those names with the Rokk- prefix, giving me Rokkthor for my Alliance main Death Knight, Rokkhulk (my Draenei Warrior), and so on.
I’ve tried to keep a theme going, but like most things in my brain, wires get crossed. There is a method to my madness, but more often than not there is more madness then method.
Of course, lately, there’s been Scaredevil. He seems to have grown into my Horde main. His name comes not from looking like a scary devil, but looking kinda like a purple version of Deadpool. And since that name was one of the names in the Deadpool movie that didn’t make the cut (along with Mr. Neverdie), I was tickled that I got to use it. And how ironic, my two main characters are both named after superheroes. And they’re both a hero class. Funny how things work out sometimes.
There’s method to my madness after all.
Four Mistakes New Raiders Make
Assuming the position.
I’ve leveled fourteen characters to 100. I’ve done Heroic dungeons, PVP, and even pet battles. I’ve farmed for mounts, pets, transmogs, and gold. I’m almost at the point where I’ve got the Brawler’s Guild on lock. So it’s s safe to say that I’ve dabbled in pretty much everything WoW has to offer. But Blizzard is all about the raiding. Dungeons? A means to gear up for raiding. Storylines? The plots get wrapped up in raids. Legendary items? Raid or GTFO (which is actually quite helpful, that’s a future reference to something I haven’t discussed yet stay with me here people).
I’m actually no stranger to raiding. Back in my Everquest days, my guild often raided numerous World Bosses and Planes of Existence. In those days though, raid zones weren’t instanced. Every guild had a rogue alt parked where the various bosses spawned. When you got the word that a boss was up, your entire guild had to race other guilds to be the first to clear to – and pull – the boss when it was up.
That, boys and girls, is hardcore raiding. The ability to mobilize a raid with whoever you had, rather than the optimal raid configuration that guilds like to push for encounters today. You had to make due with whoever your guild had online, knowing you might only get one shot at the boss. Making that pull while another raid parked itself just around the corner, waiting to move in if and when you wiped. The PLP (Play Nice Policy) extended just far enough that guilds wouldn’t try to get you wiped (unless you were on a PVP server, which I assume is a special kind of Hell that plenty of people still manage to get off on).
But that was then, and this was now. Raid comps had become more stringent on their requirements, even in LFR. For a tourist mode style of raiding, there were still groups that expected a certain level of performance out of raid members. Some of it was reasonable, some of it was not. Mythic aspirations out of weekend warrior raiders.
I’d heard the horror stories, and it kept me away for the longest time. But one day I finally took the plunge (out of desperation and boredom), not caring what mistakes I happened to make. I had to give this raiding thing a try. If LFR was as easy as everybody claimed, it would be a learning experience. And if I didn’t measure up and got kicked, screw it.
So I did some researched, queued up, and drew Archimonde as my first raid. I may not have performed as great as I could have, but after we wiped and the raid leader went through the roster to cut dead weight he didn’t cut me. I’d tried to prep myself as best I could. And you know what? Things pretty much turned out ok. Well, for me at least. But other people… damn folks. Come on now.
Now that I have run a few LFR’s, I am something of an expert as far as raiding goes. Because of course.
Experience bragging aside, there are a few things I’ve noticed in the raids I’ve been in. Some faux pas, so to speak, some that I was guilty of myself. It’s not necessarily a WoW raiding thing, because I’d seen the same kind of issues when I raided in Everquest. These issues also seemed to be some of the reasons that many people try to avoid raiding altogether. I was one of those people, so again, experience talking here.
As I said, some common mistakes kept rearing their ugly head, and the sad part is that they’re easy enough to fix. So what kinds of mistakes do us rookie raiders make?
Rokk Talk 