RP Your Life! was live on the floor of Blizzcon 2014 and reported nothing.

In previous years, I have covered Blizzcon and reported its breaking WoW news with the same fervent zeal associated with KPop fansites and quasi-celebrities of Twitter. Unfortunately, this year's Blizzcon was all about Overwatch, and the news for WoW was sparse, bordering on nonexistent. However, that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything, for the two convention days and the week of guild "bonding activities" surrounding them were quite eye-opening. Let me chronicle here the important life lessons I gleaned from my vacation, from which I spent the past two days recovering.

Traveling as a group in matching T-shirts is both awesome and embarrassing. I admit I couldn't help but feel like a total badass rolling into Blizzcon in a crew of thirty proud nerds representing our guild. It made me feel like I finally understood the meaning of camaraderie. There was a sense that we all belonged to something that transcended a mere collection of individual relationships. We were a team, and I loved being a part of it. That is... until we started yelling things like "FIREBALL!" and "BE QUIET, PIZZA!" in the middle of the convention center, and I realized there was no way to pretend I didn't know them when I was wearing the exact same shirt.

If you give people an option to "collect them all," then they will stand on line for two hours to do exactly that. Even I ended up getting suckered into waiting in that line full of people with way too much expendable income just so I could buy a limited edition pin for a friend who I haven't seen in years. Apparently a gold-colored Blizzcon exclusive Murky pin is serious enough business to call in a favor from a random Facebook acquaintance. Write that down for the next edition of Emily Post's Etiquette.

The following things and alcohol do not mix: cinnamon flavor, hot tubs, hunters who try to eat throw pillows when they're drunk, tiny Asian girls named Avia who suck at both of the tasks involved in Flip Cup, and cinnamon flavor. Yes, I wrote that last one twice on purpose because I want to know who decided that shit was a good idea. It tasted like a Christmas tree on fire.

If you put an LED candle into a drunkenly passed out man's hand, he'll eventually wake up and try to take a sip from it.

See you guys on the other side of the expansion.

-Avia.

This post kind of makes me seem like an asshole, but I'm really just awkward.

Compared to IRL, my rules for socializing within my guild are quite different, especially when it comes to fellow raiders and especially in a 25-man guild. When I'm out at a club or a party or even just standing outside of a building having a cigarette, I'll interact. I'll talk to people and find out what they're about. If someone turns out to be a douchebag, I can give the polite smile and incrementally edge away. But if we have similar interests and a good rapport, we can totally be facebook friends.

OMG FRIENDS WITH AVIA?!

However, when it comes to guildies, I've always kept a policy that I like to call the "office cleaning lady." That is, I'm my usual amount of friendly to anyone who wants to speak with me, and for anyone who does not, I'm just a person they see every day and that's it. It's not to be an anti-social jerk or because I particularly hate people. Rather, it's a strategy I utilize to minimize the situations in which I end up realizing that I spend almost twenty hours a week with someone I probably couldn't stand in real life. Sure, that happens outside of gaming too, and working anywhere inevitably involves being courteous to people one wouldn't necessarily invite to a birthday party. But in WoW, it's highly more likely that I could run into someone who thinks "God hates gays" or asks stupid questions like "If plants had feelings, would you still be vegetarian?" than I ever would in the protective bubble that I've created by living in NYC for years and then never leaving my apartment after moving away. Somehow, the raid environment feels more volatile than the real-life workplace, and every personal relationship or spat of drama has the potential to create toxic tension that makes raiding unbearably uncomfortable or to even dismantle the entire team.

That's not to say I don't develop and value friendships in game, because I definitely do. However, after years of semi-success as an office cleaning lady who manages to befriend one or two of the pencil pushers and trades a "good morning" and a "good night" with several others, I've somehow found myself willingly attending a convention at which almost thirty of my guildies from all over the continent are gathering and sharing the same house...

It's time to pull out my rusty social skills and polish them with some alcohol. I'll be back with some Blizzcon swag, embarrassing photos, and of course all the big convention news because RP Your Life! is heading to California this weekend.

-Avia.

Meet me at Blizzcon 2014!

Guess who got her Blizzcon tickets?!

Anaheim better get ready, because the preparations have officially begun for my guild's 2014 invasion. Fill the bang bus with lube, dental dams, and that annoying glitter that you can't get off of your clothes without burning them, because it's going to be a PARTAY!!!

Not exactly the three-way I expected.

Still pending is an important decision: to cosplay or not to cosplay? I've been to plenty of anime conventions, and it's never fun personally unless I'm dressed up with everyone else. However, as a new member of a reasonably competitive guild, perhaps guild decorum is more important than running around the convention roleplaying as a slutty version of my favorite Old God. After all, we're serious raiders socializing with our peers at a national community event. One must behave in a professional manner.

I'll think about it.

-Avia.

Get the costumes ready for Blizzcon 2014.

Much to my dismay, Blizzard announced Blizzcon 2014, which I'm sure will be fun and games for all involved, but it also means that this expansion is probably not coming out until around Christmas. T_T I'm going to have to pace my QQ a bit better since there are many more months of class changes and reworking of those changes about which I must throw up my arms in incredulity every time someone datamines a grammar edit on a tooltip.

However, as my new guild schedules a major get-together every year that coincides with Blizzcon, I am actually planning on going this year. Stay tuned to see if I manage to get tickets with the new "Walmart on Black Friday" sale system and get to hang out with the crew that proudly brings you priceless content like this:

-Avia.

Blizzcon 2013 Round-up

I'm going to sound like a negative nancy, which is a bummer since last year I was so excited for all the MoP changes to the talent trees and specs and was really looking forward to their development. But Blizzcon 2013 is now over, and almost none of what they have announced has impressed me much at all. Let's do this as compliment sandwich.

Compliment: The new character models are pretty cool.

Criticism: I'm getting pretty sick of time travel and alternate dimensions. They are great concepts to wrap your brain around, and every time that they are introduced, it adds layers to Warcraft universe in a unique way. However, they seem to pop up constantly, and by now whenever patch notes mention the timeways, I can only think, "What got messed up this time by who?"

Yea yea, the devs said that it's not a "time travel expansion" and that we don't have to worry about affecting the past. Then why do it? When I heard the name "Warlords of Draenor," I actually though we were going with the draenei back to Argus to take their planet back. Going through some loophole to the old Draenor seems to me like a way to rehash old content without worrying about continuity.

Also, I'm not too pleased with the new Mythic difficulty. Though the four-tier gradation of difficulties will be exactly the same as it is now, a big difference is that raiding guilds will have to progress through Normal, then Heroic, then Mythic. So rather than keeping Flex, they're making it so that the content lasts for a longer period of time before they're pressured to release more by the speed at which top guilds progress. That's a cheap tactic to me. Mythic difficulty has to expand on the mechanics of Heroic in meaningful ways for it to be worth it, and that doesn't mean that Heroic can merely be a higher DPS requirement version of Normal either.

Compliment: The garrisons look pretty cool, too.

-Avia.

P.S. Since everything is based on what information has been released so far, all of this is subject to change. Thankfully.

Mists of Pandaria confirmed. I is sad... panda.

BlizzCon is happening right now, and Mists of Pandaria is officially going to be the next expansion. There has been talk of Pandaren for months since the discovery of Blizz's trademark for the "Mists..." name, but I'm actually surprised and disappointed that what I had thought was a red herring is actually the premise of our next expansion and undoubtedly 1-2 years of my life. Pandas? T_T Half the community is seizing with joy, and the other half has the same face as I do.

Already some of the changes they are revealing are irking me, like their renewed obsession with talent trees and how they had made it too streamlined for Cataclysm. Now they want to reintroduce player choice and hybridization even though they're really just wasting their time. All the theorycrafters at Elitist Jerks and mmo-champion are going to break out their slide rules and in a matter of days, post the specs that players are supposed to use if they raid, just like they do every time there is a talent tree change. It doesn't even intrigue me anymore, but of course they haven't released any lock trees yet...

So far, the monk's food buff racial seems a little OP (double all stats from well-fed), but what actually disturbs me is the fact that they wear leather and are tank/healer/DPS. This means that while druids will now have to compete for gear and priests already share loot with mages and locks, shamans and especially paladins have no competition. If you play a priest, you know how God-awful (har dee har har) it is to gear up when you're rolling/bidding against the ranged DPS, and Firelands made it even worse by taking spirit off of almost everything. Now druids are joining them in their pitiful situation. I always felt bad for priests, but now I cry for my(alt)self.

I'll post more news (hopefully in a less whaaambulance tone) when they announce lock changes. So far, they've only mentioned that they're revamping the soul shard system. Again. Good.

-Avia.