Weekend Overview

Ulduar 10
We're still going strong in Ulduar 10, yay! This weekend we got Thorim on hard mode, and we managed to get Disarmed on Kologarn. And both in one go! We also worked on Yogg quite a bit, and we seem to have phase 1 down. It's still a very challenging fight even without the mind control, but a couple more weekends in the instance and we should have the fights down.

Unfortunately this will have to wait for a while as we won't be able to raid the upcoming weekend or the weekend after due to real life circumstances. A guildie of ours is getting married, and me and my boyfriend got an invite to the wedding.

I think he never really thought we'd accept the invite, since he's sort of getting married in Las Vegas, and we both live in the Netherlands. But hey our tax return was due and we could get the days of work so we said why not and booked.

I just wish he had managed to get married in some other week than the summer festival of course..but oh well, I guess you have to sacrifice some for your friends ;p

Ulduar 25
We had one set up for saturday, but unfortunately we had way less people show up than last week. We did FL, Razor, and XT002 with 24 and then picked up an extra healer who came online for Kologarn.

We also had less experienced people this week so Kologarn took quite a bit of effort to get down, and we called it after this since it was starting to get late, and our EST people would soon have to leave anyway.

Funny enough we did pick up two heroic achievements, one tower on FL and Disarmed. In fact the only way we managed to kill Kologarn was by switching to his left arm at the end and pray that it would go down, lol.

So yeah, while our guilds 10mans are doing awsome, it turns out to be really hard to get 25 raiders together on a time that everybody could go, and then to actually communicate the raid well enough to get it all done. Still though, only our seconds forray in there, with some heavily undergeared people, I think we did pretty ok.

Naming Oddness
I'm not sure if I had told this already somewhere, but my dad plays as well. He plays a pallie, and I think he reached level 50 today. He also has apparently a taste in naming that went against the naming regulations.

So on saturday he got a GM dinging him that they wanted to talk with him. In all his newness he had no idea what to do so it took him about 15 minutes to even figure out how to reply to the GM.

The GM was first of all pissed off that my dad had let him wait this long (wow, a little more understanding for the starting player please!) but then he was told that his name had to change. My dad of course asked why, and was told that it was a roleplay violation.

His name was StrongBeauty....anybody see any roleplay issues with this? o_O

The GM suggested a name, and my dad not knowing how to react accepted. He was told to log out, and then his name was Vousa. wth sort of name is that in roleplaying context? Afterwards he got an email saying that he had gotten a strike against his account and that the next one could mean that his account would be locked.

So when he told me on Sunday that he was quite upset over this, and that he still didn't entirely understand you can imagine that I went like 'Whaaaa?!!?'

So I opened a ticket. Waited forever, as you do with tickets these days. And finally a GM replied. I explained the situation, and luckily the GM was very understanding. He told me to hang on, and after a while he came back. He got it all arranged, and my dad would not only get his original name back, the strike would also be removed.

Both my dad and I were all happy of course, and I thanked the GM. The guy was even so cool to show up on his druid and gave us a snapshot opportunity. (Yay I have pics of my EU char with a GM!).

So all would be good.

Today my dad logs on in the morning, all was still happy. He logs on in the afternoon, and ...his character was called Vousa again. No message, no warning, nothing. Just the name back to what he didn't want in the first place.

Of course he was by now getting a little desperate, and going that he would simply cancel his account again. He was also worried that he would now have 2 strikes against his account. I sussed it, and opened another ticket. After a while I figured I didn't like the wait though so I found the customer support phonenumber and called them.

In the end the rep said that there was a misunderstanding, but that there were no strikes against my dad's account at least. I asked him if he could change the name to something he at least liked, but he didn't have the tools to do so, and I would have to open a ticket. When I left my parents house my dad was still waiting for the ticket to be answered.

All in all I have to say that while the second two support people were very helpful this was a pretty bad experience for a new player. My dad is purposely not grouping with others too much, and when he does the first thing he says is that he's very new and doesn't understand everything yet.

I just hope that this was a one off isntance, because to greet new players in this manner really isn't the best way to go about it.

What about you? Any good stories about GMs?