Long weekend is not long enough....

Memorial Day weekend has come and gone. This is the unofficial beginning of summer for most folks. Schools are usually out by now and vacations usually start. This is also when the average attendance for most Linkshells drop. You'd think the opposite, but despite what stereotypes tell us about the average MMO'er, they do tend to go outside quite a bit.

That doesn't mean it's always of their choosing though.

Anyway, was a relatively peaceful and relaxing weekend for me. Stuff I did:

Mom's Birthday

Mom's b-day was over the weekend and as usual, I couldn't get a straight answer out of her for what she wanted. So I planned a Friday night out for her. If you read a previous blog post of mine, you know that I already tricked her into going to see a movie she claimed she wouldn't like, but ended up liking. This trick only works so often, but again, she usually doesn't care which movie she ends up seeing as long as whoever is taking her buys her popcorn.

Would the trick work a second time if I risked it?

Of course. It is me we're talking about here.

Instead of not telling her which movie we were seeing, I told her we were seeing Wolverine.

"I DON'T WANT TO SEE THAT ON MY BIRTHDAY!!"

"Uhhh...I got the keys and you like popcorn, so that's too bad."

Before I tell more of this story, I need to point out one major thing that helps me out a lot when I'm trying to trick my mom.

She's 4'10".

So we get to the theater and I parked in the furthest corner of the parking lot possible, then do a near full out run about half the distance to the theater. Mom obviously can't keep up and Dad is playing wingman for me by convincing Mom to come into the theater. Once I see I'm far enough away to give me time to buy tickets without her overhearing what I'm ordering, I slow down to a walk so I don't look like a complete idiot running across the parking lot.

I buy the tickets, wait for mom and dad, get the concessions (Mom decided to be vengeful and order 2 bags of popcorn...which she didn't eat all of...) and then walk into the theater with Mom "happily" munching popcorn in tow.

At least until she sees which theater we were walking into.

"I'd rather go see Wolverine."

"It's Terminator Mom...how can you not get hyped up about seeing Terminator on your b-day!"

Movie was better than I thought it'd be and Mom actually ended up liking it. (I'd give it a 6/10. Storyline just didn't grab me, but the setting and the special effects were pretty darned good.)

As we're walking out of the theater though, Dad comments about that popcorn not agreeing with his stomach. I had to agree...my stomach was hurting some too after eating some of that popcorn. We get back to the car and I'm guessing the same thing happened to Dad that happened to me when we sat down.

We both let out some huge mega-farts.

Like father, like son right?

Yeah only Mom was in the car with us. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!~ Nothing says "I love you" more than the two main men in your life simul-farting in a closed environment. The farts were obnoxious enough that it cracked Mom up. We're still not sure if the tears were from laughing or if the farts smelled.

Einherjar

Saturday morning brought on Einherjar. I'm mostly going to blame the time of year for this, but we ended up having 6 people no-show. We also ended up losing our T3 attempt with Behemoth around 10%. I could point to a number of reasons why we lost...but they're all irrelevant and aren't things that happen normally. However, the 6 people no-showing, puts "If only we had one or two more people" on the list of reasons and for me, that's pretty much the insta-pissed button getting mashed.

So having that be the last straw for people no-showing, I suspended members from Einherjar who had 3 or more on their record for the past month. It's irritating to no-end for the core of our group to show up run in and run out only to have their success hampered by a few people who are incapable of managing their time and their commitments properly.

I hate taking disciplinary action against people. It's always a last resort despite some of the jokes I make about it. I know I give off the perception at times that I enjoy it, but I'd rather not bother with it. I know taking the actions I have will result in my having to explain why I took the actions and then having to debate it out with whoever I took the action against...and that usually just makes things worse. It also makes it incredibly difficult to take action against someone when you know they're a good person.

People simply don't realize the overall effect of that spot they take up on the roster. For every person we have that occupies a space on the roster for that run, there's another person who didn't bother to sign up because they would be put on the wait list for that run. This combination can be lethal from an attendance standpoint as Saturday's run gave fine example to. They don't realize that a good portion of the time, their inability to show up causes someone else to have to go change jobs. It's all in the name of sleeping in, going out, or doing whatever else comes to mind then coming to Einherjar in the event they're free.

That's not happening anymore on my watch. People will still no-show, but it won't be the same ones over and over again.

I hope it's a wake-up call though. I had yet to suspend anyone for habitually no-showing these runs until this past Saturday and I really hope I don't have to suspend anyone else or take further action against the ones I did suspend. I had hoped that changing our point penalties around would be a good deterrent, and it has for the most part, but it's days like these I want to eliminate. I never want to have "If only we had one or two more people" on my list of reasons we have for losing a room.

Salvage

With Ring and Omoi on vacation presumably making babies next to an aquarium somewhere...Salvage has been put on hold. At least until I planned back to back runs for Memorial Day.

Nothing real good to report here other than we got all our goals accomplished and SSR and ZR still apparently suck as far as wanted drops are concerned.

We did a little bit of a different path in SSR than normal. We opted to go east at the start and head up to do Powderkeg, Gyroscopic Gears, Citadel Chelnowhatever and the boss. No 35 drops whatsoever in this run, but overall, very good considering we were made up of about half regulars, half replacements.

Same went for ZR. Got all the frogs down and only had 35 marduk body to show for it (congrats Airy!).

I mostly organized these runs to see if I could actually run them and get the right pieces together. I've been doing salvage with Ring/Omoi, Cel/Blaize for nearly 8 months now and knowing how people tend to burn out, I figured it would be nice to help run one of these things from time to time and just let the normal leaders show up and mash shit. I'm still missing a few key details for each zone, but I feel like I'm in decent enough position with ZR, SSR and Arrapago that I can step in from time to time if necessary. Bhaflau I haven't really paid much attention to since I mostly get parked in a room while everything is pulled to me for me to stab...so I'll have to read up on that one a little further before I even attempt to run that.

Very special thanks to Cel, Blaize, Izman, Kay, Airy, Rifu, and Milie for helping me get these runs off the ground without a hitch. I appreciate it.

ANNM

Had the itch to go play with these a bit over the weekend too. These are a lot of fun, but can eat up Allied Notes in a hurry. The good thing about most of these is that it doesn't take a full alliance to go kill 'em. Generally a solid party will be sufficient enough. We went Sunday and Monday with some decent drops showing up each time. Canuck ended up walking away with the best drop in the form of an Imp. Wootz Ingot while most of the others got something like a divine log in terms of value.

Doing these once/week might be feasible, but I can see how it would be difficult to maintain unless you made a very specific point of doing 7.5k worth of campaign each week.

Speaking of...

Campaign

God this bores me to tears anymore. I forced myself to do this over the weekend until I got my Wings of Honor back. Much to my surprise, I had more fun messing around as PLD/WHM than I did DRG/WHM. Long story short...I got my Wings back and now I hope just spamming my 7 op tags a couple weeks in a row will be enough for me to maintain my rank.

Skill Up

Why the hell does PLD have so many damn weapons they're proficient at? I have issues when I look at my various skill levels and don't see a blue number. I bought up a Mercurial Sword and went to town on skilling up Great Sword. I went from 102-250 in about 6 hours of total skill up. Gotta love multi hit weapons and the new signet effect. There really isn't an excuse anymore other than sheer lack of time to not have your main skills capped. Next up is Club, Staff and Dagger...

That list of mine is getting shorter and shorter...soon I'll start the Dark Knight leveling. :)