Wooooo!

So for those of you that don't know, Linnsey and I play World of Warcraft a bit. We try not to let it interfere with our normal lives, but I just had to post here... WOOOOOO! We downed Vashj!



For those of you who don't play WoW, Vashj is a difficult boss that requires 25 people cooperating very well to kill. You have to down 5 bosses (3-4 hours of work) just to get to her, and then you have a 15 minute long fight to down her. Our guild has been making attempts on her for a number of weeks now, so it's pretty cool to finally beat her.

For the curious, here's basically what happens in the video (it's at 2x speed):

Phase 1:
The fight starts in this phase, and we basically have a couple of people keeping her attention on them while everyone else hits her until she's down to 70% health. Every now and then she casts a damage spell on one person (you'll see a skull appear over their head), and everyone has to get away from them. This is the easiest phase of the fight.

Phase 2:
You can easily tell when this phase starts because Vashj heads to the middle of her platform and blue beams shoot at her from the 4 torches on the platform. She becomes immune to all attacks. The raid splits up here and we all work on different tasks. A bunch of people head to the outer ring of the circle to kill water elementals. Each of these that get through to Vashj increase her damage by 10%. If 2 get through, we're dead in the water.

Another group of people (including Linnsey) start attacking the giant striders and lure them around in circles while killing them. Anybody who gets within 8 yards of one gets hit with fear and is forced to run away at high speed.

The rest of the people (including me) go to the center at kill the nagas that spawn.

Every minute or so a specific monster appears and whoever sees it has about 15 seconds to kill it. From the body they loot an object which has to be tossed character to character to get it to someone standing next to one of the torches. Using the object on the torch removes the blue beam to Vashj.

Phase 3:
You can tell when this phase starts because the fourth blue beam goes down and the music changes. All of the nagas, striders, and elementals up at this time have to be killed, though no more will spawn. This phase is identical to phase 1, except that bats start flying into the room and dropping green crap all over the floor. 2-3 seconds in the green crap is deadly, so it's pretty much a race to kill Vashj before too many of us perish in the green goo.

So yeah, WOOOO!

All Quiet on the Puzzle Front

It's been quite a while since I last posted here, and I think that's largely due to a lack of puzzle events that I have either been playing in or working on. The lack of BANGs has largely meant there are no puzzle events in the "off season". Fortunately, things have been starting up again with Iron Puzzler a few weeks ago, a Midnight Madness themed game in early April, and a BANG-esque game from coed astronomy coming later that month.

Iron Puzzler

Iron Puzzler was a blast, and despite initial worries about changes to the scoring system, I think it actually improved the quality of the puzzles we saw. Despite having no direct penalty for making a puzzle that was way too hard, the double-counting of fun scores assigned by other teams gave a strong incentive to make puzzles that most teams would solve. 4 teams actually finished all of the puzzles before time was called, despite having 2 more puzzles than last year.

coed astronomy did quite well in the event, and we used our winnings to obtain some quality merchandise from Endgame. But, what made me most happy was that both of our clues did so well in the fun category. "Funness" is always so difficult to measure, but it's something we always strive for in our clues.

I'm always amazed at what my fellow puzzlers can come up with in 24 hours. Since only 7 teams were fortunate enough to play in Iron Puzzler, Greg is thinking about using the puzzles in a future event. Unfortunately, this means I can't talk about them, but there were some real gems in there.

San Francisco Game

coed astronomy will be running a walking game in the city on April 19th. I probably won't be too involved in this one due to wedding planning and whatnot, but it should be fun. More details to come later.

Midnight Madness

Midnight Madness, an *awesome* movie, as well as Michael J. Fox's debut film, is also the catalyst that started the game. Or not, if you believe wikipedia. Anyhow, an anonymous team will be running a Midnight Madness themed game on April 5th, and I know I can't wait to play. More info can be found on Curtis' blog.

This was a Triumph

I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!

Some links for you to play with:

• George Washington
• Titanic
• Queen Liliuokalani
• San Francisco Earthquake
• Buddhism
• Tale of Genji
• Roman Empire
• U2 Shot Down
• Crusades
• Xerxes
• Gandhi
• Summer Olympics

Grr

There is a special special place in hell for refs who change their call when friends on one team whine at them. Bad calls happen, I get that, but for both the up and down ref to call a ball on the court but then reverse it and award the team a point because their friends don't like it? Lame.

What a Difference Spelling Makes

Linnsey and I often eat at Kapps Pizza on Castro Street. It's not the best pizza ever, and the service is variable, but it's close by and it's better than delivery. When we were there the other night, they had an additional "specials" menu added to their regular menu, which had steak and wine on it.

Kapps isn't exactly all too upscale, and it's pretty well known as a pizza joint, so the steak and wine seemed a bit out of place. Reading further, I was rather surprised to find that their chardonnay was "nicely pared with our steak". Linns and I decided that if the wine were frozen and you used the sharp t-bone from the steak, this would be possible, though not desirable. Needless to say we got a salad and a pizza.

Really, though, what can you expect from a restaurant started by a couple of Berkeley grads? =)

Law and Order: Scrabble Victims Unit

I know I haven't posted in a long time, but I guess it took an extra special amount of serendipity to get me to post today. I received the following phone call yesterday afternoon while waiting for a meeting:

Me: Hello?
Caller: Hello, I'm calling from the Pittsburgh area, is this the emergency number for Scrabble?
Me: Umm...
Caller: You know, like the board game. I found a couple of phone numbers on the internet listed as the emergency contacts for Scrabble, but it was odd because they're residential numbers. Do you know anything about this?
Me: Nope...
Caller: Yeah, neither did the other person. Thanks anyway, though.

This would have been funny enough as it is, but this morning I read Jan's blog, and found out that she received the exact same call. The answer to this mystery can be found in the following page that we gave out as the reference packet for the 2004 Section Leader Game, which just happened to have a board game theme. As best as I can figure, our mystery caller probably had a Scrabble rules dispute on her hands and went to the internets to solve it. She found our reference packet and had no idea what the SL Game is and thought that our emergency contact numbers were for the boardgames listed.

Bonus points to anyone who can find a set of reasonable Scrabble rules search terms that bring our reference into the top 10 results on Google...

Volleyball

For once, I'm posting something not about puzzles or the game (I promise I'll do a Google Puzzle Hunt write-up soon...)! I used to play a lot of volleyball back in the day. I was on the high school team, and I played for a club team in the off season. I was never particularly good in comparison to many of my teammates, but I always enjoyed it.

Ever since then, I've tried playing volleyball with dorm IM teams, with friends on the weekend, etc, but it's just not the same. If you know how to play, you usually wind up as the setter. And don't get me wrong, I love setting, but only when there is someone there to hit the ball. I make it my goal to get one solid hit in every time I play, and more often than not, I fail in this goal. Any game where the optimal strategy is to just pass the ball back over rather than setup a real offense just doesn't cut it in my book. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm not having fun, but it's just not volleyball to me.

So on Monday, I finally got to play a solid game. Serendipitously, I had been mentioning to Peter that I really missed volleyball, and he told me that someone he knew was short a person for their league team. He forwarded along the email, and I wound up playing with them this past Monday. The team basically had two *amazing* setters who were about as desperate for someone to set to as I was for nice sets to hit. So it all worked out well. We only won one game, but we kept the other 3 pretty close. I probably got to hit more on Monday night than in all of the time since high school. Needless to say, I will be going back next week.

I was trying to explain to Linnsey how exhilarating it was to finally play on a team of good players, but she's not particularly big on team sports and didn't seem to really be getting it. So I tried the following explanation:

Me: So you know how sometimes we wind up doing a Shadow Labs pug and the tank can't hold aggro and then the hunter can't figure out how to trap and keeps unsheeping mobs and then we wipe over and over?
Linnsey: Yeah.
Me: That's what the last eight years of volleyball have been like for me.
Linnsey: Oh...