The Return of the Sister

In yesterday’s episode of “How in the World (of Warcraft) did we find these Nutjobs?”, my guild tagged two (RL) sisters into our ranks — the good sister was a pleasant guildmate and solid raider; the evil sister used the guild like a match.com. At least we weren’t being used for loot, as is more typical.

No. Wait. Well shit, we were being used for fast loot too.

After roughly two weeks of creeping weirdness (emphasis on creep), another raid day arrived: the sun was shining, and Ironforge’s Myra Tyrngaarde had fresh bread for sale as the gaming witching hour arrived — which we now know is between 5:00 am and 6:00 am, server time. The gaming witching hour, you might recall, is that time of the day when players desiring to leave their guild, log on for a quick /gquit (guild removal) so they don’t have to offer explanations or long speeches.

I’m not sure which I prefer: the long speeches (omg, just leave already) or the wordless /gquits (wtf?).

The two sisters logged into the game, /gquit, and then the hunter-sister (the would-be wife of the perfect man) made a short post on our guild boards thanking us for the fun, wishing us well, and please visit her Myspace, in case we had missed the addy the first 25 times she posted it. Again, I trampled a gnome warlock in my haste to check her Myspace for new glitter icons and flashing banners glamor shots.

That night, before the raid, there were whispers of some “issues” that had DRIVEN the sisters from our happy family. I love issues. Wherever there are issues, there also is a good story. I resolved to seek out this story for myself and attempted to add the two sister’s character names to my WoW friends list … for investigative purposes. Not stalking, INVESTIGATION.

Well, well. Invalid player names/players not found. In other words, for the non-WoWs in the audience, those player names no longer exist on my server because they applied for server transfers earlier in the day. Interesting.

I reported my findings to selected officers, known for their unnamed sources, and returned to raid preparation. Word came back that the two sisters left the server because one of our gnome warlocks was “harassing” the hunter-sister. Orly? asked me. Yarly, said they.

I’m. Not. Buying. It.

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The Two Sisters and a Gaming Safety Lesson

If your World of Warcraft guild is like my World of Warcraft guild and you too have spawned multiple “guilds that hate your guild” (as well as numerous players who wouldn’t piss on you if your heart was on fire), then you should be aware that the recently beta’d armory can be a valuable tool in tracking your enemies.

I spent my morning coffee time surfing down some of our former guildmates — because I hope life is treating them … well.

The Emo Tank — Last I heard, he had server transferred and was thinking of transferring back oh! if only we’d take him back. (Umm no.) What I hadn’t heard, he name changed, or deleted in a fit of emo-ery, because there’s no level 60+ warriors with his character name ANYWHERE. And this is why I hate name changing in MMO games, people can fly under your radar. You are completely unprotected.

It’s remarkably easy to do in WoW, no GM approval necessary, although it will cost you unless your server is on deck for free character transfers: Create same-named character on your target realm, apply for transfer, your character will be flagged to change the name — POOF! You’re under the radar.

So now, Emo Tank could be back for all I know and preparing for his assault.

There’s three other players I can think of that server transferred after brief drama fits: the guildbank-stealing rogue (not our guild bank, some other hapless guild — Read re: The guildbank thief) and The Two Sisters.

Guildbank thief, I already knew he name changed so I have no means of tracking him down. There’s no real danger from him since we haven’t guilded any new rogues for … months, nor will we for … months.

So anyways, The Two Sisters. That’s a long story.

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How to Juice Your Game Screenshots, Part II

Yesterday, I went over how to use Photoshop and other advanced image editors to juice up your game screenshots to brilliant, enviable images. (Part I) The same can be accomplished with intermediate-level editors too, although not as quickly.

The four steps of my quick juice job are: Correct the color, adjust brightness, boost the contrast, and sharpen.

Here again is the unaltered screenshot from World of Warcraft’s Blade’s Edge Mountains, our starting point:

Painful Deaths (unaltered)

Almost every editor, including the freebies, has an Auto Correct Color or some such function. Usually, the auto color correction is too harsh for game shots and with a lot of the freebies, there’s no adjustment slider or option to to take away some of the correction … ala Photoshop’s opacity slider. Trial and error, aka Edit » Undo, will be your friend here.

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