Month: October 2016

A little privacy

by

You’ve all seen me ramble about some of my social anxiety issues before, but Blizzard has brought it all back to the surface again. In patch 7.1 there’s a new Quick Join feature that allows your friends to see that you’ve joined a queue or a group finder group and easily join you. In theory this can be great. In practice I’m not sure this is something I ever want to use. I’m too timid to randomly join anybody who was starting a queue, I would rather pug than impose on my friends. Conversely, sometimes I want to pug, for the goodie bag or because I’m feeling antisocial. If a friend asks to join either I have to tell them no and feel bad, or let them join and then I’m not doing the pug I wanted to do. At least if you queue for a Call to Arms (goodie bag) it will not show you as available for Quick Join. Maybe I will start only queuing for things that are Call to Arms, honestly that’s not super different from how I play normally. Still, I will continue to shout this from the rooftops: Give us a damn invisible mode already Blizzard.

This also complicates getting mythic or M+ groups for people without a lot of friends on their list. Now any group that forms has a higher chance of filling up with friends-of-friends before strangers get a chance to sign up. This means if you have a huge friends list your chances of doing more mythics just increased, and if you have few friends it will be even harder to get a group. Just add regular mythics to LFD already Blizzard. This Quick Join tool is solving a much less pressing problem, and causing new ones.

I’ve been slowly working my way back up to a friends list with nearly 20 or so people on it, which is about 20 more people than my anxiety could handle before. If this new tool becomes a problem for me, I’m back to either purging my friends list or just running away from the game again. I get that this is not a problem that most people have, but I also know I’m not alone. It would be nice if Blizz ever once gave any indication that they acknowledged people like me exist and have valid concerns.


A little privacy

A little privacy

by

You’ve all seen me ramble about some of my social anxiety issues before, but Blizzard has brought it all back to the surface again. In patch 7.1 there’s a new Quick Join feature that allows your friends to see that you’ve joined a queue or a group finder group and easily join you. In theory this can be great. In practice I’m not sure this is something I ever want to use. I’m too timid to randomly join anybody who was starting a queue, I would rather pug than impose on my friends. Conversely, sometimes I want to pug, for the goodie bag or because I’m feeling antisocial. If a friend asks to join either I have to tell them no and feel bad, or let them join and then I’m not doing the pug I wanted to do. At least if you queue for a Call to Arms (goodie bag) it will not show you as available for Quick Join. Maybe I will start only queuing for things that are Call to Arms, honestly that’s not super different from how I play normally. Still, I will continue to shout this from the rooftops: Give us a damn invisible mode already Blizzard.

This also complicates getting mythic or M+ groups for people without a lot of friends on their list. Now any group that forms has a higher chance of filling up with friends-of-friends before strangers get a chance to sign up. This means if you have a huge friends list your chances of doing more mythics just increased, and if you have few friends it will be even harder to get a group. Just add regular mythics to LFD already Blizzard. This Quick Join tool is solving a much less pressing problem, and causing new ones.

I’ve been slowly working my way back up to a friends list with nearly 20 or so people on it, which is about 20 more people than my anxiety could handle before. If this new tool becomes a problem for me, I’m back to either purging my friends list or just running away from the game again. I get that this is not a problem that most people have, but I also know I’m not alone. It would be nice if Blizz ever once gave any indication that they acknowledged people like me exist and have valid concerns.


A little privacy

Plus Anxiety

by

Plus Anxiety

Me and this chest do not get along well.  It is not so much that the chest itself offends, or the items that come from it…  but instead the process of getting it to unlock.  When I first heard about Mythic Plus dungeons… I thought it was pretty freaking great.  It sounded a lot like the Greater Rift system in Diablo 3, and I was completely on board with it…  until I actually set down to do one.  I don’t handle timers well, namely they cause me so much more anxiety than they should.  Literally if you put the easiest quest in the world on a timer… I will avoid doing it like the plague because it feels like every fiber of my being has to be concentrated on beating that timer.  I mean I should have know this going into Mythic Plus content given that Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 cause the exact same sort of roller coaster of stress.  To make matters worse… the first several keystones that we attempted we failed at miserably, which made me feel like the biggest failure of a tank in existence.  This mental block against timers goes way back in my psyche, and it isn’t something I can entirely control.  Once upon a time when I was a youngin… I went from being in the highest performing mathematics class to the lowest performing one… all because of a timer.  There were these worksheets called mad minutes, where you were judged on how fast you were able to do math problems…  not how correctly you worked them.  The grading scale was skewed in a way that not making it to a problem was twice as bad as missing one.  I’ve always been a fairly pensive person, and even though I push myself not to be…  that is my nature and when you put me on the clock it puts me into panic mode.

All of this said…  last night we ran two Mythic Plus dungeons and we were able to complete both of them before the keystone expired.  So I guess I am managing the panic mode, well enough to push through a dungeon in time to get progress.  Now I will probably NEVER go for the whole multiple chest bullshit, because I lack the drive to attempt to get multiple chests… when the loot in said chests is more than likely shit.  On the positive last night I managed to pull a 5 item level higher version of the trinket I like, getting it at 845…  which still seems really low to me given the effort.  That however is a completely different rant for a different day because honestly I feel like every tier of mythic plus is 5 to 10 item levels too low for the effort spent in running it.  What is the tale of today however is that apparently I am working through my anxiety with being on the timer.  I still over prepare for this process and try and make sure there is nothing that could possibly interrupt my focus while running the dungeon.  It was a huge boon last night when we got revenge on Halls of Valor… which is one of the early pluses that we attempted and failed at least twice.  The entire goal of last night was simply to get the chest from our order hall unlocked that you can see above in the screenshot from Skyhold, however I will absolutely walk away with two victories that beat the timer…  one of which was good enough to absorb a wipe on the final boss and still managed to pull out a win.  Plus will likely always be a stress factor for me, because that timer… feels so insanely oppressive.  I tried my best NOT to watch the timer, because it is one of those situations that so long as I didn’t think about it I was largely fine.

Plus Anxiety

by

Plus Anxiety

Me and this chest do not get along well.  It is not so much that the chest itself offends, or the items that come from it…  but instead the process of getting it to unlock.  When I first heard about Mythic Plus dungeons… I thought it was pretty freaking great.  It sounded a lot like the Greater Rift system in Diablo 3, and I was completely on board with it…  until I actually set down to do one.  I don’t handle timers well, namely they cause me so much more anxiety than they should.  Literally if you put the easiest quest in the world on a timer… I will avoid doing it like the plague because it feels like every fiber of my being has to be concentrated on beating that timer.  I mean I should have know this going into Mythic Plus content given that Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 cause the exact same sort of roller coaster of stress.  To make matters worse… the first several keystones that we attempted we failed at miserably, which made me feel like the biggest failure of a tank in existence.  This mental block against timers goes way back in my psyche, and it isn’t something I can entirely control.  Once upon a time when I was a youngin… I went from being in the highest performing mathematics class to the lowest performing one… all because of a timer.  There were these worksheets called mad minutes, where you were judged on how fast you were able to do math problems…  not how correctly you worked them.  The grading scale was skewed in a way that not making it to a problem was twice as bad as missing one.  I’ve always been a fairly pensive person, and even though I push myself not to be…  that is my nature and when you put me on the clock it puts me into panic mode.

All of this said…  last night we ran two Mythic Plus dungeons and we were able to complete both of them before the keystone expired.  So I guess I am managing the panic mode, well enough to push through a dungeon in time to get progress.  Now I will probably NEVER go for the whole multiple chest bullshit, because I lack the drive to attempt to get multiple chests… when the loot in said chests is more than likely shit.  On the positive last night I managed to pull a 5 item level higher version of the trinket I like, getting it at 845…  which still seems really low to me given the effort.  That however is a completely different rant for a different day because honestly I feel like every tier of mythic plus is 5 to 10 item levels too low for the effort spent in running it.  What is the tale of today however is that apparently I am working through my anxiety with being on the timer.  I still over prepare for this process and try and make sure there is nothing that could possibly interrupt my focus while running the dungeon.  It was a huge boon last night when we got revenge on Halls of Valor… which is one of the early pluses that we attempted and failed at least twice.  The entire goal of last night was simply to get the chest from our order hall unlocked that you can see above in the screenshot from Skyhold, however I will absolutely walk away with two victories that beat the timer…  one of which was good enough to absorb a wipe on the final boss and still managed to pull out a win.  Plus will likely always be a stress factor for me, because that timer… feels so insanely oppressive.  I tried my best NOT to watch the timer, because it is one of those situations that so long as I didn’t think about it I was largely fine.