Penny Arcade has taken over Boston, and since I’m a stone’s throw away in NH, I got my ticket and I went down to see what it was all about.

I spent an hour on a bus, 25 minutes either walking or on a subway, 3 and a half hours in line, then another hour and 45 minutes in a chair in the theater at the convention center, first waiting for, and then watching/listening to Wil Wheaton’s Keynote. This was the reason for me to be at PAX and it did not disappoint. My $30 one-day ticket was worth it for that one hour of gaming humor, even if it did come after 5 hours of waiting in line.

My plan was to hang out after the Keynote and check out the booths, and then try to meet up with Averna and her group around 5:30ish, but by the time 4:30 rolled around I was pretty much itching to get out of the place. Maybe it’s because I was alone with nobody to talk to. Maybe it’s my general disdain for large crowds. Add to that the fact that I forgot to Add her number to my phone, and couldn’t get gmail working on my phone or iTouch… I pretty much just wandered around for a while, and wandered my way back to the bus depot to head home 2 hours earlier than I had planned.

Maybe next year I’ll recruit a friend or two, and actually go in with a plan other than, “get outside your comfort zone and go to a giant gaming convention alone you big baby.” While yes, I did “get out of my comfort zone,” and I did, “go to a giant gaming convention alone,” and was not “a big baby about it,” I didn’t take as much from the experience as I should have. I should have spent time in the console freeplay room, playing games I was interested in, or games I had never heard of. I should have stuck around and tried to get in touch with Averna somehow. I should have, and I didn’t. Now I know what mistakes not to make next time. Right?

Right. So next time, who wants to go to PAX with me?

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It looks like they’ve announced Blizzcon folks! October 22-23 2010. It also looks like this will be the first year that I attend. Watching last year on my notebook was great, but being there, going to the meet-ups… Well that’s why there’s a Blizzcon!

Tomorrow, I’ll be at PAX-East in Boston, and I plan on stopping by the Nvidia booth to chat up some unsuspecting Blizzard employees.(still unsure who’s supposed to be there other than Bashiok, but who cares? I’ll talk to a brick wall if it works for Blizzard) It’ll be my inaugural convention, so I am thinking it’ll show me what to expect at Blizzcon. I may be wrong, I may be right. Either way, Both are sure to be Amazing!

Some time this weekend I plan to post info about my first con. YAYNERDYGAMINGCONVENTION!!!

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::Edit:: Our contest has ended! Krizzlybear is our winner! Grats Krizz! ::Edit::

Today I recieved an email from my favorite friend, SC2BetaUS. He’s like my bestest pal. He works for Blizzard. He sent me an additional invitation for the Starcraft 2 Beta for me to share with a friend. Since none of the folks I hang out with in the Real world are into Starcraft, or games in general, I thought I’d pick one of my friends from World of Warcraft, the Blogging community, or the Twitter community.

This will be a simple contest. Reply to this post, or send a DM to @maerdred on twitter with a Haiku. There is but a single caveat for the contest. As the email specifically states that the invitation go to a “friend,” if I don’t recognize you,  you won’t qualify. No trying to steal someone else’s invite! Current and former Guild members are invited to compete (Raging Daisies, Kohrruption, Unemployed, Sidhe Devils). Members of BlogAzeroth, Plus Heal and Single Abstract Noun are welcome to compete. If you have previously commented here, feel free to compete. If I follow you on twitter, please compete. If you’re on my Blogroll, you probably fit in with the other categories already, but still… Compete!

This contest is open until 12:00 Noon(EDT) Friday March 19th. I will post the winner here and on Twitter, shortly after that time. An email will go out to the winner with the code, and instructions on how to activate it.

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Blizzard has officially announced the Liberation of Gnomeregan. I am pretty sure we’re going to see quite a few blogs about this pop up today, so what I’m going to do is take it in a (hopefully) different direction.

With the Liberation of Gnomeregan (and Echo Isles) the Gnomes(and Trolls) will finally get their own capital city. What this means for Gnomes is most likely far larger than I can imagine at the moment, but one thing it does bring to mind is the addition of Gnome Priests in Cataclysm. We’ve already seen glimpses into some of the lore surrounding some of the new race/class combos, Most notably the Tauren Priest and Paladin, and the Night Elf Mage. What I’m hoping for is some sort of revelation during or right after the liberation of Gnomeregan.

I’d love to be fighting my way towards liberating Gnomeregan and find some sort of snippet of conversation or a quest which lays out the foundation for Gnome Priests. Many people are still wondering how this is going to play out, and I’ll admit that I am one of them. Perhaps something will happen during the liberation and an NPC Gnome will come to a revelation, or possibly will need to embrace the magic used by Priests before being able to further his or her cause.

I think this would be a great way to do it. Gnome engineering and inginuity not being enough to take down the forces who have contaminated the city, Gnomes take up the Holy and Shadow magics of Priests to help them in their liberation. That sounds epic. That also sounds like a pipe dream.

What do you all think?

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That’s right folks, I spent some time and made myself a new layout. Not very different from what it was, but it took me some time to do it, so I’d like to take this opportunity to ask all of the folks who read my sporadic postings from a Feed Reader to come one in and take a load off. There will probably be updates to the About page incoming shortly, but I’d hate to make a promise. We all know how the pony thing went down… (GhostCrawler totally promised me a pony!)

Stop by, say hello, stick around a while. If you have a new level 80 Resto Druid or Ret Paladin, take a look at the featured posts off to the right there. They may help quite a bit.

Did I mention say “Hello.” yet?

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Thursday night, while leveling Mini-Maerdred over on AD I decided to queue up for a Warsong Gulch match to see how the Experience is from PVP. Very quickly I knew we were in trouble. Just before the match started, the call came out that “We need some people on D.” I stuck around and played D. Nobody else did, not even the genius who had come up with the idea.

When the Druid, Twink Paladin and Rogue came in to take our flag, I was supremely overmatched. I think I got the druid down to about 90% health (remaining) before the Paladin and rogue cut me down. Gee that was fun. When I popped at the Graveyard, right back to our flag room I went, only to find the Rogue and a warlock waiting for the flag to repop. They killed me handily. PVP is fun guys…

The next time I popped at the GY, I ran up to the landing above the Flag room. The rogue had apparently had the same idea, and I was instagibbed. So much for Teamwork and being smart. From that point on, I decided to just play mindlessly like the rest of my team, getting HK’s in the open field, just waiting for the Horde to win the match so I could get back to Loch Modan and killing Troggs. I got three or four killing blows, 15 HK’s and died 4 times total. I didn’t get very much XP for it, but it was a fine experiment.

The thing I learned most byt this experiment was this. I still hate PVP.

Back to Questing. in a level I’ll be able to queue for randoms, and as a Feral Druid, I’ll be tanking, so that’ll be fun. Nice to learn that aspect of the game all over again, since it’s been about three years since I tried it. At least I’ll have a guild full of bloggers to run randoms with so I won’t have to pug mutch, and of course, my main’s guild is headed up by my favorite Bear Tank of all time, so I’ll be able to pull info from BBB whenever I choose. That’ll be fun.

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I can think of only one possible scenario in which you, my lovely readers, don’t already know about the guild made up of the blogging community. That one scenario is this; you only read my blog. If this is the case, I am ashamed of you. The World of Warcraft blogging community is immense and extremely talented. If I’m the only one you read, you are missing out on worlds of information and entertainment.

My blogroll, Right over there in the right pane of this website, is a good place to start. Most, if not all of those blogs also have a blogroll listed on their page somewhere. It’s a daunting task but I implore you, lovely reader, go forth and read! These people are amazing!

If you do read other blogs, I am sure you’ve come across postings about this mysterious Blogging guild before, but if not here’s my update.

<Single Abstract Noun> is the bloggers’ guild. We have EU and US versions, both on their respective Argent Dawn server. EU is horde-side and is headed up by Tamarind from Righteousorbs.com. As for the US counterpart, we’re headed up by Miss Medicina and are Alliance. If you’re interested in the blogging community, head on over to your local Argent Dawn server and create an alt of the proper faction to get you started.  I know that on the US server you can /join singleabstractnoun and ask for a guild invite, but I’m not sure if that chat channel is set up on the EU server.

I joined <Single Abstract Noun> for kicks last Friday night, and rolled a Night-Elf Druid named Maerdred. Yes. I know. I am very original. The best part of it is, I made him look EXACTLY like “real” Maerdred does. But that’s not important right now. What is important is that this guild is open to anyone. If you write a blog? You’re in. If you read a blog? You’re in.

The very best thing about this guild is that it’s made of Bloggers and their readers. It’s the most social guild I have ever seen, and also the friendliest. If anyone ever has a question “Where do I get the Spider Ichor for this quest?” two, three, fifteen people chime in with info to help them out. “Do I want AP or agility?” a few will chime in with figures and advice. Being in a guild with the most informed people in the game makes leveling simple and fun. That’s all there is to it. There’s always someone there with the knowledge that you need, because as Bloggers, many of us have either written a leveling Guide, or done the math or even just read enough of others’ guides to remember the information.

I’ve leveled Mini-Maerdred to 14 and so far when I’ve been on, I have not seen less than 20 others logged in at the same time. That’s a feat in and of itself. Last I saw, I believe there were over 200 characters in the guild, spread across at least 175 accounts. There may be more now. Last night while I was logged in for about an hour we invited 6 new people. If that’s a trend that continues, we’re going to be full soon and need a sister guild.

There’s a forum for the guild up somewhere, and I hear that someone is working on a listing of all bloggers who have joined by piecing together a list from forum posts and replies to Miss Medicina’s post on the subject. I think it’s going to be a huge list, and it will surely rival even the largest Blogrolls out there. I know it’ll be causing my feed reader to grow, possibly my blogroll as well.

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I have one thing to say…

Get your grubby claws of of my healing leather. That’s Mana Regen Spirit, not Hit Rating spirit!

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