Theater Thursday - January 24

Today is a double feature. Funny stuff. Watch them. You will comply. Resistance is futile.

The Grind - Episode 1



The Grind - Episode 2



All I can say is... sky rockets in flight afternoon delight.

P.S. I promise next time I won't just repost something I saw on WOW Insider. Lame. I know. My excuse? Um, jury duty for a few days now. Listening to lawyers drone on and on is melting my fncking brain.

Missing You

I pushed the reset button when I returned to World of Warcraft two months ago. A fresh start on a new server, new faction, and new guild. No complaints. A positive experience every time I play. I'm having a great time exploring new zones, new quest hubs, and new lore. The guild is full of friendly, fun, and mature people.

However. I miss the Outlands. There, I said it.

I retired my old main, a level 67 orc hunter. He's on vacation in Blade's Edge Mountains. But I'm considering playing him one night a week, just to get a taste of the Outlands. Why do I feel dirty thinking this?

Here is a thought I had driving home last night. I'm certain it's not an original thought. I can buy a new name from Blizzard for $10. I can buy a new server from Blizzard for $25. I'd happily pay Blizzard for the ability to start a new toon at level 60. I don't mean buying an account or paying someone to level up a toon for me. I just want the option on the character creation screen to start at a higher level than level one.

Some questions though...How would it work? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks?

Perfect Storm

A few weeks ago Stormgaard over at Se7en Samurai was complaining about not having enough time to blog and wanted to cut back. His self-imposed slow down was, of course, short lived. A few days at most. And then what shows up in my Google Reader today? A freaking 35,000 word doctoral dissertation on how to play a holy paladin in World of Warcraft. All I can say is:

OMGWTFBBQ!!1!
/wink

I don't play a paladin, but the piece is well written, provides concise details, and gave me some excellent insight into the class. Okay, I just lied... I do play a paladin... but that's my daughter's level 9 toon and a story for another day.

Where's My Warcraft?

Rum? Check.
Coke? Check.
Warcraft? No.

The kids are fast asleep. I have an adult beverage in hand. Thoughts of running a few dungeons buzzing on caffeine, sugar, and alcohol. I pugged Dead Mines the other night and they called me god after multiple demonstrations of my near divine healing skillz. Not to brag (hehe). Wonder how I'd do over the legal limit.

Nope. Blizzavision has gone fubar on me. Hung at authentication. Perfect.



Thinking I need a "plan B game" for times like these. Something to fall back to if WOW is down. Maybe I'll dust off my copy of Rome Total War or try my hand at the boy's Zelda Twilight Princess. Now that should be interesting with good buzz going.

Theater Thursdays - January 17

Just Loot It via WOW Insider.



A modern Aristophanes emerges. The poetry is sublime.

Greed roll when you pass
Oops I mean need
Need need need
Then log with ninja speed

Anticipation

Where was I one year ago? What was I doing? It's hard to believe that a year has passed since the Burning Crusade was released.

A year ago my raiding guild was eager to start playing the expansion. We had a handful of people that played in the beta. Between their reports in the guild forums and the info we scoured from the intrawebs, the guildies were dying to start running the new instances and working on our Kara keys.

I reserved a copy at Gamestop and made plans to pick it up at midnight. That night I showed up early and stood outside in the cold drizzle with a few hundred others. The install and account upgrade went surprisingly smooth. I was soon in the game, stepping through the portal, and running away from a roaming fel reaver.

The Burning Crusade was the first time I played an MMO on release. I was a little kid again, feeling joy and giddiness like I hadn't felt for so many years. All the recent MMO releases just don't excite me. At least not enough to tolerate the standard new-release-problems-and-issues.

So... I've purposely been ignoring news and info about Warhammer. Anticipation is okay but only in small doses, thank you very much. However. Stupid me. I subscribed to the Warhamma podcast and listened to it on my shiny new iPod on the drive home tonight.

How many more months until WAR's release...?

Auctioneer One Month Later

About one month ago I posted about the Auctioneer addon for World of Warcraft. Today's post is a quick recap on my experience with it.

A little background information. My main character (since resubscribing and going Alliance) is level 37 and has two gathering professions. I have a few other very low level characters. The loot and materials this character collects gets sent to my auction house character parked in Stormwind. His sole purpose is to scan the auction house, create auctions, and flip the occasional underpriced item.

He started with 2 gold and now has 190 gold in his pocket. This doesn't include the 100 or so gold he sent back to the other characters for gear. This is anecdotal evidence of course. Your mileage may vary.

Tobold posted a good article on the limitations of Auctioneer. See here. All valid points. But this is my thoughts on the addon... sure it has its limits and the data you get can be a bit whacky. However. It simplifies the auction house. I spend a fraction of the time posting auctions compared to my pre-Auctioneer days. No more hemming and hawing on the price of heavy leather for example.

My shaman is in STV now, so I have plenty of those Green Hill pages. But Auctioneer had no data on it. Weird. Then I realized it doesn't have any data because the auctions are bought out too fast. Sure enough, my auctions were gone in minutes.

A few more tips for you:

• Search for underpriced raw materials such as herbs, ores, and leather.
• Stay away from engineering and enchanting materials. I find them volatile and too much trouble. Cloth is also dicey.
• Look for level 19, 29, 39, etc. weapons/armor with +stamina and +whatever else is good for the kind of class that would use it such as agility for hunters on leather gear or strength for warriors on chainmail gear or +shadow damage on for priests/warlocks on cloth gear.
• Remember patience is key. Both in scanning and posting auctions. That is, you may have to sit on an item for days before you can post it for a good price.
  

Dirty Tricks

Playing a low level character in World of Warcraft can be annoying at times. I'm talking about the random party invites from level 1 characters, usually on the wrong continent. Don't bother accepting them because they're just ploys to pitch you gold buying or character leveling.

Ahhh, but thanks to Blizzard's recent changes the party invites have disappeared. I don't have the link with me but the kids at Blizzavision removed the ability for free trial memberships to do party invites (I may have read it on a blog... sorry for not remembering who said it). So nice not having to Decline a party invite every 30 minutes.

Last night I was messing around on my level 27 shaman, and the same level 1 character kept spamming the Ashenvale general chat with things like: "Where can I find iron ore? PST" and "Free 16 slot bags. PST"

Odd that someone with 16 slot bags to spare wouldn't know how to find iron ore nodes... or know enough to sell the bag in the auction house and buy the iron ore. Hehe. I got to try the new report spam feature. Daddy likes.

My guess? The next dirty trick the gold sellers are trying. Good luck.

Ghost Wolf FTW

I rolled a shaman to join my guild's Monday night team. My target is level 35, and I'm at level 24 now. The shaman class is fun to play with its mix of ranged and hand-to-hand combat plus heals. The ghost wolf travel form is crazy. It's like having a mount at level 20. Fun, fun.

The Game Dame posted a couple articles with tips on playing shamans. Good stuff for a newbie shaman like me. Check it out:

• Tips for Your Shaman in Warsong Gulch
• Dungeon Tips for Your Shaman - Part 1

Last weekend I was tapped to fill in for a Team Manaka (the guild's Saturday team) member who couldn't make it because she had to work. The all guild team consisted of a warrior, priest, mage, hunter, and shaman (me). I was nervous because I was a substitute for a regular team member, but no worries once we got rolling. Friendly, fun, and mature. That's how I describe the team. Everything clicked and we had a great run.

I've played the healer and DPS in many small group dungeons from Ragefire Chasm through Underbog (tanked a few times too). But this was the first time I was playing back up to all three of the primary roles. This was a challenge, but a fun challenge. When the priest went out of mana, I backed him up. When the mage pulled aggro, I frost shocked the mob over to me and kept it occupied. But I spent most of my time dropping totems, interrupting enemy spellcasters, and smacking things in the noggin.

I picked up a couple pieces of armor and a rolling pin. No, that wasn't a typo. A better one-handed mace dropped and I won the roll for it. Cookie's Tenderizer (I think). It looks like my toon is swinging a rolling pin though. Increased my DPS by about 15%. I'd post a screen capture... but I'm at work. Hehe.

Fun Fact Friday: In real life I worked at a small bakery for about a year. The specialty breads and pastries type of bakery. While I never had to whack a murlock over the head with a rolling pin, I made some killer sweet rolls.

Blood Watch Is Under Attack

The other night I hearthed back to Blood Watch to turn in a few quests for my dranei shaman, fly to Exodar to train skills, and then log out. It was late and I was tired, but I like to leave my characters in a "ready to play" state.

After the loading screen disappears, I'm greeted with a ghost town. Some level 70 warlock sack o' shite has turned the sleepy village of Blood Watch into a killing field. I have to admit I was impressed with the thoroughness of his rampage. Bones everywhere. Not a NPC left, and he'd take them out soon after they respawned. Guess I missed all those "Blood Watch is under attack!" messages in my chat frame.

A dozen or so lowbie players were standing around. Some were laughing about it. Some where cussing about it. I'm more like ho hum. Time to make bandages or quickly sell junk to a respawning vendor before Mr. War Crime one shots him.

Eventually some high-level Alliance take pity and shoo the warlock away. Thankfully this scenario doesn't happen often. I can appreciate the thrill of taking out an entire town in a starter zone. Not my thing... smells like griefing to me. Why waste all that time just to deny other players access to vendors and quest givers?

I have an idea. To encourage that "here comes the cavalry" behavior, give these good samaritans a reward for swatting a pest. Bonus honor, gold, special two hour buff, experience, fluff trophies, whatever. Anyone doing damage to the griefer or healing someone doing damage receives a reward appropriate to their level.

Ah... the joys of playing a popular MMO.

Small Group Feel Inside a Guild

I know a few people in RL that play World of Warcraft. Unfortunately their work schedules are opposite of mine or they play so infrequently that I rarely see them online. The people I liked from my old raiding guild are still in that raid-or-die mentality. While they were polite when we chatted, I got the feeling I was little more than a failed raider and ex-guildie to them. Sigh.

What is a hardcore casual player to do? I enjoy the solo play, but the group content is what takes the game to another level. I tried being a raider, but that didn't fit my play style. Pickup groups are too risky and frustrating. I like reading Wilhelm's posts over at TAGN about his regular WOW gaming group as they tackle different instances week after week.

/jealous
/sad
/QQ

That's what I want... a group of players that keep their characters within a narrow level range and meet once or twice a week to have fun and run instances. But how? How to join a group when most of my friends and family are non-gamers. If they are gamers, they're the Halo type of gamers.

Does this sound familiar to you? Keep reading.

Earlier this summer I posted a short series on why I left WOW. Stormgaard from Se7en Samurai commented on it and suggested I check out his guild. After resubbing last month, I did. The guild I recently joined, The Seven Samurai on Alleria (Alliance), is genius in how they establish teams (small play groups) within the larger guild environment. Money quote shamelessly reposted here:

Our guild teams offer members the opportunity to group on a regular basis without having to worry about out-leveling each other. The secret to this is that team characters are only played on the nights specified for each team. Think of it like a weekly "Poker Night" - it's in the exact same spirit. We pick different classes that compliment each other and have a blast leveling through the game together.

Anyone may join one of our established guild teams or create their own if they wish. If you join an existing guild team it's required that stay within a workable grouping level range of the other members. If you wish to create your own team you will need to name at least one team captain so that other guild members can contact you if they have any questions.
-Stormgaard

There is a one-to-one relationship between characters and teams. That is, once you have one of your toons join a team, you only play on that team and on the scheduled night. (Except, obviously, to do stuff like tradeskills or training, etc.) The key is once a character joins the team you keep your character near the same level as the rest of the team. You progress through the content together.

Also, perfect if you like playing multiple toons. For example, I could have one character on the level 20 team, another on the level 45 team, and a third at 70. Plus a couple of other alts I play on the off days. That's an example of course... my new toons are currently levels 3, 11, 14, and 20.

Joining an existing team or starting a new one is simple and informal. Filling in on a team if someone is absent is also a possibility. Just ask in game or post something in the forums. So much simpler than that raiding guild I was in. Daddy likes. Hehe.

I didn't okay this with the guild ahead of time, but if you've read this far down the post, then I assume you're interested in The Seven Samurai. We play on Alleria server on the Alliance side. Players are spread across all the US time zones, so chances are there's a team for you. Post a message in the forums if you're interested in joining or ping someone online.

Auction House Made Easy

The Auctioneer addon is an important tool in the World of Warcraft, but has no part in the UI that I am slowly piecing together. Why? I use Auctioneer to streamline the whole buying and selling process. But the addon is a memory hog.

I want to spend as little time as necessary posting the raw materials my toons collect or the random equipment that drops. Plus Auctioneer lets me earn some money the old fashioned way... buying low and selling high. I earned about 5 gold with literally about 2 minutes of work. Not bad since I only have a couple under 20 toons on this server.

The first step in my system is to create a character that just hangs out in a capital city. This is the only character with the Auctioneer addon loaded. His only purpose is to move items from the mailbox to the auction house, and then send money back out. My other characters send him stuff in the mail instead of posting the stuff in the auction house themselves. This reduces time spent travelling and keeps my main characters' bags tidier.

The next step is to scan the auction house often, but not more than once a day. The key is patience. You can't download the addon, run it a few times and expect the magic to happen instantly. You want at least a week's worth of data to get a clear picture of an items real value. The more times it scanned the auction house, the more confident you can be in Auctioneer's suggested price. I click the Scan button and find something else to do. In fact, it's running as I write this blog post.

After the scan completes, I can mouse over the item in my bag and a new little tooltip tells me what Auctioneer thinks is the items real value. Also, in includes info if the competition is above or below price. No more having to search the auction house manually to figure out how much my stack of light leather is worth. That's not fun for me. Some people may enjoy it. Thank you, but I'll take the easy route.

Next up is searching the auction house for items priced well below market value, so I can scoop it up and repost it. Flipping under priced items is easy money... assuming you're willing to take the occasional loss. My rule of thumb is to not risk any more than I'm willing to lose. Right now it's about 50 silver. That's my threshold. I won't buy an item to resell for more than 50 silver. As my toons' wealth grows that threshold will increase.

I can't stress how important patience is to making money with Auctioneer. You need to wait for data to collect. You also need to wait to post items at the right times. I've had to sit on a good item for a few weeks, because some yahoos were underselling it.

Random Junk Dec 3

Odds and ends tonight. Busy in RL over the weekend... and leveling up Alliance toons to join teams in my new guild, Seven Samurai. But more on that in a future posting.

My boss actually followed through with her promise of comp time to pay me back for the 3 weekends I worked last month. Nice. I took Monday off of work... good thing too because I went out to a bar Sunday night and indulged in a little too much holiday cheer. Never mind Daddy, kids, his tummy feels icky.

I use Google Reader and it's sitting at 150+ articles to read. I glimpsed at the titles and looks like some good stuff. I'm saving that for tomorrow morning at work. Hehe.

My wireless network frustrated me. Past tense. I was getting bumped off the Internet too frequently, which makes battlegrounds or healing in a group a very bad thing. My solution was not elegant but quick and effective instead: get wired.

Shaman is a fun class.

If you've read this far, my thanks for sticking through my rambling. Adios.

WSG Twinks Waahhhh

My new Alliance priest dinged level 19 a couple days ago. My gear is laughable - a mix of low level greens and whites. Plus I rerolled on a new server, so no gold stockpiles to dip into. Occasionally I get these crazy thoughts such as let's upgrade my toon's gear by earning all those cool PVP rewards.

I played the 10-19 battleground bracket for the first time in two years. I was prepared to get slaughtered by twinks. No delusions here. Getting whacked in two hits though... yikes.

Twinks. Blizzard sure screwed up. Let's have a player's first experience in Warsong Gulch be against a bunch of twinks with enchantments created and balanced for level 60 toons. Why does everything in World of Warcraft have a minimum level requirement except enchantments? I'm talking about the old 1.0 WOW enchantments. Blizzard's mistake. Stat bonuses for a level 60 toon should not be stacked on a level 19.

I'm not claiming to be some kind of hotshot in the battlegrounds, but I know how to play a priest. Last week I was playing my level 49 undead priest in WSG and AB. Rarely died. Top healer in most matches. Mid-range on the damage. I know I'm whining, but it's something bugging me.

I played enough matches to get the back piece: 10 tokens needed, 10 lost matches. Hehe. I actually had a couple of close matches, but the Horde twinks outnumbered the Alliance twinks.

For the record, I have no problems with the concept of twinks. It actually sounds fun planning and building a twink to compete in the battlegrounds. The enchantments are too much though. What do you think?

Battleground Buffing

Dear Horde Teammates,

While waiting for the battleground to start, please give out whatever 10+ minute buffs your class is capable of giving. Simple concept really. Power up your team, increase odds you'll overwhelm your enemy, and gain early momentum.

As a priest I have a little ritual I do before the battleground starts. I work my way down the list of raid members giving them Power Word: Fortitude, Renew, and Shadow Protection. Guess how much mana it costs me? Zero. Nothing. Z-E-R-O. That's right... if you haven't heard, buffs are free before the battleground starts. So why aren't more people buffing? Hello, Mr. Mage, please give me an intellect buff because a priest out of mana is worthless. You liked how I gave you a 35% increase to your hit points. Feels good, huh? Now return the favor.

Buffing yourself and teammates gets tricky after the battle starts. I tend to buff myself after rezzing. Buffing other people depends if I'm playing offense or defense and the current situation. For example, if I die protecting the flag carrier, I'm not going to spend time and mana buffing because I need to get back to the carrier ASAP so I can shield, heal, and decurse.

In Arathi Basin I go defense... either static at a single node or mobile and bounce between hot spots. When I'm playing defense I have usually have time to buff my fellow defenders and allies rezzing in the nearby graveyard. People are typically thankful and surprised.

In Warsong Gulch I go offense, mixing heals and dispels with fear, silence, and DOTs. I hand out very few buffs after the WSG starts. I can't afford the mana to buff everyone, and I don't have time to sit for a drink to recharge. The flag carrier (and any other guards) get buffs, of course, when we're hiding on the roof or behind the graveyard.

My motivation for buffing in battlegrounds? 75% selfish and 25% altruistic. I like to win. I like receiving more tokens and honor points. I like the gear I can buy with them. Getting a "thank you" feels good, but I like winning more. Greed trumps goodwill. My guess is you feel the same way, so let's see more buffs in the battlegrounds.

Thank you,

Link

P.S. If the Alliance is smart, they'll buff up before the battleground starts. Which means we better do the same, or we're starting at a disadvantage. Duh. So, please, more buffing.

BigDaddyUI 0.6 - Chat and Automation

I dropped five more addons into this evolution of my World of Warcraft UI.

Two mods are working behind the scenes to make life simpler. Automaton handles boring stuff like automatically selling gray items at the vendor, repairing my items, and ignoring duel requests. The FreeRefills addon buys items up to a predefined level. For example, I set FreeRefills to automatically restock my ammo, pet food, and drinks. No forgetting to grab meat for the cat or bullets for my gun. FreeRefills does not have a GUI config dialog. Instead, you have to use slash commands to set it up. For example I have to type "/fr add [Rum and Coke] 20" to get my undead priest sh1tfaced. This addon is a better fit for higher level characters and hunters.

After moving the minimap to the lower right corner, I added another action bar in two vertical columns. I scaled the size down some with the thought I'd put occasionally used spells like buffs or pet summoning. However, the default tooltip position was covering part of the minimap and this little action bar. TinyTip to the rescue. I configured it to use almost all the default appearance and info settings. I'm using the addon to reposition the tooltips. I like TinyTip because of its small memory footprint compared to a few others I tried out.

Next on my list of addons were chat related. I wanted to update the look to match the more modern style I'm evolving towards. I installed the Prat and MiniChat addons and monkeyed with the settings.

Okay, MiniChat does one thing... add an arrow in the upper right corner to minimize or expand the chat panel. If you've played World of Warcraft, you know how bad and stupid the chat can be at times. Now with a click the chat panel is minimized, showing only a single line of text.

Prat, on the other hand, has a bewildering number of options. I left most of the settings alone, except a few minor look-and-feel tweaks. I'm putting this addon on the list to review in more detail later.

A couple new screen caps below. FYI... click on them to see the images full size.

Seven is a Lucky Number

Much love to my new World of Warcraft friends on Alleria server. They were gracious enough to let me join their guild: The Se7en Samurai. Check them out.

I played one Alliance toon to level 5 a lifetime ago, so this will be new content for me... at least for the first month or two. I've had fun starting over on a new server. All my other alts received gold and big bags from my upper level characters, so this "starting over from scratch" thing is a refreshing twist.

BigDaddyUI 0.5 - Map, Buffs, and AutoBar

Another day means more World of Warcraft mods to add to my evolving UI. Two simple, one complicated. All from WowAce.com. By the way, check out this WOW addon search tool I saw posted up on WOW Insider. Searches all the major addon sites.

I'm using simpleMinimap addon to square off my mini map, scale it down a little, and move it to the lower right corner. This area was a dead space. I considered dropping the mini map altogether because I rarely look at it, but it does have it's uses so it stays.

Now that mini map is out of the way, my buffs look odd hanging out in their default position. I used Buffalo before taking my break from WOW, so that's that addon I'll start with unless something better comes along. Buffalo meets my requirements: customize the position and spacing of the buffs and debuffs and add countdown timers to them. I like to glance at my buffs and know if I have 3 minutes or 23 minutes left on my fortitude buff.

I'm not showing my target's buffs, which is an issue I need to fix. For example, I ran a few Arathi Basin battlegrounds with my priest and had difficulties knowing who to buff or not. But I'm not sure how to handle target buffs or what addon to use. Pitbull, Grid, or something else? Meh.

Most recent screen capture below. Me healing in Arathi Basin. I thought my priest was level 50 or 51, but pleasantly surprised Sorrows was still at 49. Time to kick Alliance in the teeth.



The map and buff addons were quick additions, but this next addon was trouble but worth it. I'm talking about AutoBar. This addon builds a bar of buttons based on various pre-configured categories of consumables and the such. AutoBar scans your bags and selects what items to show based on how you set it up. For example, I have one slot dedicated to healing potions and healthstones and another to foods. The cool part is the buttons expand if you have more the one item in a category. All my buff potions are shown when I mouse over the slot. Plus! AutoBar automatically adds items on the fly, which means no more searching around my bags for that one random potion I just looted.

I didn't like the default slot categories though, so I started with a blank slate. After setting it up, I accidentally reverted it back to all empties. D'oh. The config panel is so-so but would benefit from a dose of user friendliness. I shouldn't complain, the addon author has my thanks. Check out AutoBar's wiki here.

What addons am I using so far? This is a complete list:
AutoBar
AutoBarConfig
Bagnon *
Bagnon Options *
Bartender 3
Buffalo
ClassTimer
ClearFont 2
ClearFont 2: Font Pack
cyCircled
Fubar2
Fubar ExperienceFu
Fubar LocationFu
Fubar MiniClockFu
Fubar PerforamnceFu
OmniCC *
OmniCC Options *
Pitbull 2.0
Quartz
SharedMedia
simpleMinimap

Where am I getting these World of Warcraft addons?
Most of the addons come directly from the WowAce.com list of beta addons. A few addons are from the WowInteface site (marked in list).

BigDaddyUI 0.4 - Rework and Timers

First off let me say that all those minor unit frames and action bars in World of Warcraft are giving me headaches. I'm talking about the pet, focus, and target's target unit frames. Also, the stance and pet action bars are annoying me. I want the UI to look balanced and simple whether I'm off fighting baddies or crying my eyes out on a park bench. See below.



You can tell from the screen cap that I moved the PitBull player and target unit frames side by side. You can't see it in the example above, but the pet unit frame is to the left of the player unit frame with the focus unit frame above that. If I don't have a target selected, the UI looks off balanced. However, this move lets me position the Quartz cast bars above the unit frames instead of to the side. I found that when I was playing the game I was watching my cast bar closely to perfectly time my next spell. Big increase to DPS but my eyes were too far off the action in the middle of the screen. Function will always trump style.

I tried a few different spell timer addons and picked ClassTimers because of easy setup and breadth/depth of features (my mantra). Like player and target casting bars, a buff/debuff timers are critical. For example, I can see at a glance how long I have until my sheeping or rooting wears off. ClassTimers gets high marks because I can place separate timer bars for my character, my target, and my focus. The screen cap isn't a good example.

The stance and pet action bars will have to wait. I'm not happy with how tight the bottom of the screen feels. I want to keep the action bars and unit frames centered, but then the chat frame is squished on one side and there is dead space on the other. You know what would help is a widescreen monitor. Hehe. Think I can convince Avril it's a necessary family expenditure... instead of say new tires for her car?

Guilded, Really?

Last night after Heroes I logged into my level 30 tauren warrior, which I left parked at the mailbox in Undercity and who was never in a guild. I was working on my UI, figuring out where to put the stance bar and toying with another new batch of addons. My bull was motionless for thirty minutes easily. Then I received a whisper from a complete stranger.

Stranger 1: do you want to join my guild?
Me: why?
Stranger 1: why not?
Me: /who Stranger 1 ((level 17 belf warlock in guild XYZ))
Me: good point

I decide this guild either immediately recognizes my skill, intelligence, charisma, and good looks OR their recruitment standards are so freaking low that they will take any random mid-level toon standing by a mailbox. I go back to working on the UI and mind my own business.

Twenty minutes later a female troll starts flirting with me at the mailbox. I, of course, start flirting back Tauren style.

Stranger 2 blows you a kiss.
You whistle at Stranger 2.
You moooooo at Stranger 2.
Stranger 2: Would you like to join my guild? We're a fun, casual guild with 300+ members.
Me: /who Stranger 2 ((level 43 troll mage in guild XYZ))
Me: lol, is your guild on a recruitment spree? you're the second person to whisper me about joining

Turns out this is the guild leader, and we chat for awhile. I figure what the hell and joined up. They had forty odd people logged in at 11:00 PM on a Monday night. Players were spread out between the low 20s and low 50s. Hmmmm. I tend to go with the flow, so let's see what happens.