Some On-the-Go Roleplay

Instead of going back to the Lion’s Pride Inn, Elford spent a few nights at the Scarlet Raven Tavern and the Raven Hill camp. It was both an attempt to actually get a decent night’s sleep for once, but also out of convenience.

The Scarlet Raven Tavern was usually pretty empty, which wasn’t a big surprise, Darkshire was a ghostly place altogether. Raven Hill, though, could only offer him a room in a tent, which was well furnished when you’d consider the walls were made of canvas.

Outside a few people gathered, one of them wanted to “wake that gnome up”.

The man proceeded to just stand near Elford’s bedside, slightly on the creepy side, still Elford didn’t wake up.

He had had a few bad nights of sleep and wasn’t that easily disturbed. Dwarves, however, can be rather stubborn.

So Elford was woken up and questioned about twilight cultists in the middle of the night, which, by the way, he had in fact seen the evening before marching towards Darkshire. The dwarf was disturbed by this information and as for Elford, he quietly mumbled something offensive in gnomish and then went back to sleep to dream about where to go after having done his duties in Duskwood.

New clothing

Elford also got some new clothing which puts him at 340 armor (he’s lvl 30). Notice the little shoes with green socks in them, hottest in gnome fashion! He also purchased a new wand, although he never uses it anyways, it does too little damage. The shoulders he found himself… somewhere out and about.

Elford is now wearing:

Keeshan’s Bandana

Cross-Stitched Shoulderpads

Thin Cloth Armor
White Tuxedo Shirt

Padded Bracers
Padded Gloves
Padded Belt
Tuxedo Pants
Padded Boots
The Rock
Bent Staff
Pestilent Wand

 

Elford’s wishlist:

Noble’s Monocle, Russet Hat

Diamond-Tipped Cane

A good looking cloak

 

Ps.

The pictures have not been staged and I don’t even know these people. Elford did in fact find himself in the middle of a bit of roleplay, which fit perfectly within his storyline and he had actually seen twilight cultists the night before, so I suspect the roleplayers were enacting a big plot or something. Maybe I should get the addon FlagRSP installed to attract more on-the-go roleplay, I enjoyed it.

Next episode: The WoW Ironman Challenge – Level 30 Status
From the beginning: Elford the (former) Executive and the Ironman Challenge

VisualRoleplayGear Exposure

Yesterday was one of those days where your jaw hits the desk and you drop everything you have in your hands, cause the internet surely must be lying to you! You refresh your webpage because something must be wrong, but quite the opposite was going on in our case. That was how this pretty regular wednesday started out when we were looking over the traffic to The Visual Roleplay Gear List, after we saw the stats page as pictured below.

Noelani and I were already happy with the traffic VisualRoleplayGear was getting, mainly coming from roleplay guilds linking to us on their forum, often German for some reason. Exposure was slowly going up, until June the 29th, then it went bezerk. What was usually 1.500-2.000 clicks a day suddenly looked like nothing compared to the numbers we were getting from being linked on WoW Insider’s Daily Quest, topping at 15.744 clicks (not visitors!). The visitor number is probably somewhere between the number of referrers and homepage views, that is between 1000-4000.

The project has been going for a while now, with me linking the site on the old roleplay forum back in November (2010), and throughout this time we’ve built it to contain 373 unique articles and has as of now 216.531 views all-time. Considering the amount of work we’ve put into this, we’re both glad it’s being worthwile for so many other players and that we’ve been linked at a time where we feel confident in the amount of content we’ve built so far. It’s such a force of motivation, that both of our heads are spinning with ideas and new additions to the site.

The most popular outfit on the 29th, was the Demon Hunter, which is kind of funny as it is also (almost) the hardest set to complete amongst our entire database, requiring two legendaries. We made an easier alternative though, and the comment on the article contains an even easier version available for a character lvl 30-40.

Here’s our “easy version”:

 The nomination of the hardest set to complete right now goes to “The Gamemaster”. It looks so simple and lvl 20′ish that any new player might not even recognize a gamemaster if they saw one. I’ve never seen one myself, and as far as I know, they can however choose to appear in other forms than wearing the standard GM attire.

Our latest additions have been recolors of WotLK tier gear, which you don’t often see put together to an actual set. I originally thought that those sets would be too hard to get and no one would organize runs to fx Icecrown Citadel for vanity gear, but I was wrong. At least on our server (Argent Dawn EU) you can still catch a roleplay run a couple times a week heading for Icecrown and Ulduar especially, so getting your hands on some of this stuff, is indeed feasable.

The only three recolors available in Icecrown -  priest, druid and warlock:

Ulduar on the other hand, is riddled with recolors.

Our next addition will probably be gear sets which you can only get via completing quests. There are some incredibly nice looking sets out there available at low levels by just leveling through a zone. Consider this black leather set for example, which you can collect by questing in lvl 40-5o zones. We’re looking at some of the easier sets to get, compaired to weekly runs to Icecrown.

This set also comes in a green and red version. I’m currently struggling to complete the white recolor, as it seems the pants are missing and who wants to go without pants?

Thanks for all of the support and help we’ve received so far.

Happy gear hunting!

“Gnomes vs Tauren” – Including Offensive Gnome Lurv

I would call the Gnomes vs Tauren event a success, not just because the tauren eventually died, but also because I made it as far as to hug Garrosh and fought alongside the lvl 1 expert and co-blogger – Döra.

In my clever’dom I was convinced that choosing a rogue was a genius idea: “because then I wouldn’t run out of mana”. Despite my efforts to foresee some of the issues of being a caster, the difficulty of staying close to your tauren target, when you can’t find yourself in the sea of gnomes, and the lag constantly puts you on the edge of a dc, made the choice of melee a really bad one. I did manage to take a few stabs at the guy though between all the misses and then I died in an aoe storm.

Estimates say there were more than 600 gnomes. It was unfortunate that I didn’t make it into the event-guild Armée de Gnomeregan. Döra, however, did and I think they were a little more generous with the English in their guild chat. Oh well, I understood the many praises at the end, and some words are just used more broadly across servers, “GOGOGO” never fails.

Gallery

I used a mixture of my own screenshots and those posted on various forums in relation to the event. The same sources can be found at the bottom of the post.

On the elevator with a few other figther gnomes.

The instant I went outside, the lag and continuous dc’s began, making it almost impossible for me and Gniggle (aka Döra) to communicate.

Charging towards the designated spot where rumours said there was a sacrificial tauren to be slain.

Dressed as a Twilight Cultist, the tauren finally went down…

…But so did we. Someone was probably biting their lip while hovering a finger over their aoe button – I can’t blame them.

What a somber capture – we died, but we ressurected en mass to flood the land anew.

Lenwë, one of the people arranging the event, is giving out orders in both French and English dressed for the occasion in a tux.

Then everyone took off on our long Marathon, from Ironforge, through the Tram to Stormwind over Stranglethorn Vale to Orgrimmar.

For a brief moment, the Tram was actually in a state of real Rush Hour.

Everyone was jumping, I assume gnomes love train rides.

No time for a guided tour around Stormwind.

People started dinging in front of me right near the edge of an exploration spot. That was actually a very captivating sight.

Lots of French chat that I didn’t understand, but in the upper corner I’m dinging lvl 2.

A Horde point of view of the gnome army crowding Duskwood.

A trail of ants or gnomes? Tomato, tomahto I guess.

Booty Bay dock, waiting to get on the ship.

This time we got attacked a few times. But I was lucky and made it on to the boat with only two deaths.

At this point, I think everyone had gone slightly insane, the heat, the cold. Frantic gnomes shooting at anything that moved.

I remember seeing “Jonyjones” a few times during the event. I hope they didn’t torture the poor guy, he was so brave.

Me, Gniggle and a few others starting corpse-running to get further and further into Orgrimmar.

Orgrimmar grunts are incredibly fast at gnome-execution these days, so most of the distance was traversed in ghost-form.

I’m lying at the right side of Garrosh. Notice the carpeting of gnomes on his throne. He didn’t give me time to explain that I just wanted to hug him.

So I hugged him as a martyr. Success!

I was very impressed by the escorting by our Alliance guards. Having guards and escorts are often crucial to these kinds of events, especially when the slightest amount of PvP is involved. The Strongest of the Horde Rp-PvP event also had a ton of allied guards on both sides of the factions. Without them, such events usually crumble as everyone becomes scattered and the unity dissolves. I was suspecting that could happen, as an army of lvl 1 gnomes can’t defend itself very well, but due to good planning and reliable co-players, Team G.O., who arranged it, made sure everything went smoothly.

I’ve always been a strong believer in death in games as more than just a temporary suspension of play. As my early days in WoW was spent doing a lot of PvP, I always saw more symbolism in killing and being killed by another player. This event was probably the first time that I didn’t find it to be a big deal at all. Everyone died all the time in what could have been a horrible gnome genocide mass grave, but I quickly got over the unfair aoe blast of a lvl 85 horde and resumed fighting, it really did just feel like a small pause, nothing else. Even when it happened later in Stranglethorn Vale, where another portion was taken down by a warlock, I didn’t mind. I stood in the middle of the dead corpses to get a screenshot, and of course that’s like baiting, so I was also killed and awarded with the top-spot of the pile. Maybe I can use this experience to subvert some of my uglier sides that peek out when I PvP.

Corpse-running our way into Orgrimmar was surprisingly entertaining. In Garrosh’ throne room, several hordes were present, some saying prayers for our dead gnome bodies, as the guards swiftly shot us down. Garrosh himself was not up for our chatty tea party, he’s much more of a hack and slasher I’d say. We came in good faith, the fellow gnome Killbull blew him around 10 kisses, Gniggle cheered, whereas I hugged him twice. Offensive gnome lurv made Garrosh miffed! But then I see on Döra’s video, caught red handed, that she tried to cast a shadowbolt at him – well that explains a lot!

Other Resources

Döra’s write up including her Event Video (Ignore my spamming of her)

The Official “Gnomes vs Tauren” event video by Lenwë, one of the organizers of Team G.O.

Another video by Tobynou named Invasion Orgrimmar.

The Team G.O. forum thread, which has a broad collection of screenshots, some of which I used in my gallery.