Blog Revived

 
I know it has been many months since my last post stating I would return to this blog.  Well, that was going into the summer season and I should have known I wouldn’t keep up with it like I intended.  It is now late into the month of October.  The weather has cooled and the rainy, grey skies of fall weather are upon us.  So what’s new?  Glad you asked.

In the World of Warcraft, things have received a great shake up with the impending Cataclysm coming ever near.  I am not going so far as to say my favorite class and raiding spec is broken, but it is close.  I am of the mind that competitive raiding and PvP action is over for WotLK content as the game begins the transition to Cataclysm content and mechanics.  The game has definitely changed and we all know that change is hard for many people to easily accept.  I have a rough time with change myself unless I am coached or otherwise helped to prepare for change.  I told myself that the new patch was called 4.0.x for a reason, and that is because it is WoW 4.0.  WoW 3.x.x concepts and mechanics are now a thing of the past.  I will most likely cut back on my WoW hours while things are in the midst of changing.  Another reason for a raiding break is that after trying to raid ICC25 last night was very little fun at all due to many different bugs and technical issues.  I had to turn the sound off while raiding due to the bad sound delay issues that are known.  The work-a-rounds that are posted such as disabling Death Knight voice effects, making sure the sound wasn’t set to system default in the WoW interface, and even reducing the hardware acceleration on my sound driver didn’t work. 

My place of work is also under going changes.  The upper management has seen fit to reorganize some of the gaming floor space.  The room we currently utilize as our comfortable and quite poker room has now been designated as a new area for high limit e-game (slot) machines.*  The poker room is to be eventually moved to another room with slightly less floor space which is fine as we never ran at full capacity in our current setup except maybe once during a tournament series.  Notice how I said “eventually”?  They haven’t even begun converting the new space for the poker room to suit our needs.  So where does that leave us until they finish?  We will be right in the middle of the open gaming floor in the midst of all the noise and smoke.  The only positive I can find in this situation is that we might draw a couple of extra players who just walk up, see the tables, and think to themselves, “Gee, that doesn’t look too hard.  I can take them.”  We will definitely lose many of our regular players who have grown accustomed to the smoke-free and quite atmosphere we provide with our room even if it is just a temporary situation.

That about covers many of the changes I’ve experience during my absence from the blog.  In my next few posts, I will cover some things I am definitely looking forward to with the release of the Cataclysm expansion in WoW.  Until then, good journey!