Build-an-Alt Project

Phase 2 Reminder

deekow — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:45:03 +0000

Hey there! Why haven’t you voted on your new character’s race yet? This is the good stuff, right here. These are the only true permanent decisions we can make about the character (without spending real life coinage), so these matter a lot. If you’ve voted already, why haven’t you dragged your significant others, siblings, parents, friends and neighbors over to vote yet? One day left… And still need pics too!

Phase 1 Complete, Phase 2 Voting

deekow — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:46:18 +0000

First round of voting is done, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the amount of participation. Also surprised by the upset victory of the Hunter class choice! Not often that you have a two-way tie and a third choice comes up from behind to win it. Even more odd is that Shaman was the first to reach five votes and no one voted for Shaman in the tie-breaker. Fickle folks you are! And the biggest surprise of all… Death Knight got ZERO votes. Here you had an opportunity to basically decide to start from scratch or skip to level 55 and head straight to end-game; and considering the highest margin of my readers is (assumed) DKs, I’m curious why that happened that way. Leave a comment and let us know why you voted the way you did!

Results – Gender: Female; Class: Hunter; Server Type: PvE; Faction: For the Horde!

Initial voting round had 34-37 votes (odd, in and of itself), and 11 votes for the one day tie-breaker. Nice job folks, but keep spreading the word and leave comments telling us why you vote the way you do, and especially if you have any suggestions for future votes.

But, without further ado: round 2!

About the only other stuff we have to take care of at this point is Race and appearance. Can’t really take care of appearance until we know the race, so this is how it’s gonna work: regular three day voting round for race. Easy, right? Not so fast… during that three days, you ALSO need to put together some appearance shots of each of the races that can be horde hunter (everyone but undead). Remember to make it a female. You can take screenshots of the new hunter by either having WoW in windowed mode and hitting shift-print-screen, then go into paint and paste it and save… or you can log into the game with your new hunter and take a regular screen shot there. I encourage you to crop the screen shot for size considerations, but that’s up to you, since… the second part of this is that you’re going to need to host this somewhere. I’m not the king of web resources, but I know there are tons of places you can host for free (it’s only one pic) such as Flickr or your own domain space. Heck, if you have public forums that you have permission to upload pics to that we can all access for free, you could host a pic AND get some free publicity for your guild/company/whatever in the process. Priority is picking the race, if there are issues with the pic hosting, we can handle it another way. Ideas?

Race considerations: Troll are best with a bow, and have haste racial ability. Orcs have extra damage from pets and Attack Power boost. Blood Elves have the best starting area xp and gear wise (though, we can take another race here). Taurens… well… as much as I love the kows, female taurens are somewhat rediculous. It’s not just the size of them, they have the silliest voice to go with it, and well… just do what you need to do, but please, have mercy.

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Tie-breaker!

deekow — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:43:14 +0000

As of this time yesterday, it was a tie between warlock and shaman… but instead of breaking the tie, you made it a three-way, adding hunter to the mix! I can’t close the polls, for some reason (not fond of polldaddy), but as of right now, hunter, shaman, and warlock are at 5 votes. So, emergency voting time…

Things that may matter: I have a 72 Shaman, so have experience levelling one (as elemental and enhance); I have a 38 Warlock, fun but got torn away. Hunter honestly may make the best choice with this, due to the added voting capacity a pet (and choice thereof) brings to mix.

One day vote, fix this!

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Time’s Almost Up

deekow — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:10:43 +0000

Going to close the first official poll tomorrow morning. As it stands, we’re a female horde shamlock on a PvE server. While I wish I could actually play a shamlock (next hero class?), what it really means is that there’s a tie between shaman and warlock, and you need to round up some friends to break the tie (or round up support for another class and kick the shamlock in the jibblies). As Syrana eluded to in her comment, there are an unequal amount of votes for the polls… and I’m kinda stumped by why someone would vote on one poll and not another… Probably some weird LotRO players trying to break the WoW system!

Anyway, 24 hours from now, your initial votes will be locked in and we’ll finish up creating ourselves and prepare to open our eyes in the world of Azeroth for the first time. Again. Or, something.

Let the Games Begin!

deekow — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:21:43 +0000

Alright, as promised, it’s Wednesday and it’s time to start the madness! My original poll to decide to even do this was also a test to see how quickly results could be counted on. Ideally, you’d know that I had a vote up and would be able to make the decisions neccessary within a couple hours, I’d have the results and things would proceed. Obviously, that’s not going to happen. It’s a fine line, actually… if the poll is too short (time wise) then not enough people see it and you may feel you didn’t have time to help participate in the process… too long and this gets long and drawn out and you wait forever for little changes to be made. My thought right now is that I’m planning on playing this character for 2 multi-hour blocks each week. If I can space that out, then we can count on a reasonable 3 or 4 days for polls. That seems a little long for my taste, but no sense closing a poll before I can/will even act on it, yea? Yea.

I’m also going to say this often, so get used to it, but… if you don’t like the choices offered or have better ones, or even ideas for future polls… SPEAK THE FRAG UP! I’m the controller of the alt, that’s it! Seriously, the more decisions you make, the bettter. There’s a certain amount of decision making I’ll have to do on my own (“which ring slot should I put the ring in” is a pretty pointless poll… unless there it would be an equal upgrade for either slot, etc), but any choice that really, truly matters is yours. So… if you want this to work as well as it can, participate, participate, participate, even beyond what’s required for the polls.

So, getting it all started, let’s slam out some polls! I’m going to go ahead and put class up first, since that’s generally more definitive than race, and we’ll leave race to the final choice, all other things pending. I’ll later put up races for each side, then will choose the actual race based on whether you pick Horde or Alliance. The rest should be self-explanatory, with the following thoughts:

1) Death Knight. I do have a raiding level 80 DK already, so I’m fairly familiar with the class. Choosing DK saves us 55 levels of tedium, but also 55 levels of your participation in the project. Would also mean I wouldn’t have access to the resources I currently do on Runetotem.

2) Server type. I’m not a huge WoW PvP (herein referred to as WoWvP) fan, so a PvP server wouldn’t be my first choice… but that’s not to say that I suck. I’m not arena winning quality, but I am pretty kick butt when I put my mind to it. PvP servers generally are my very least favorite form of PvP in the world though, so… take that for what you will. RP servers… I can totally enjoy them, but I probably wouldn’t RP much myself, but I also would respect the ruleset from that server.

3) Everything else server related: If you want me to have access to all of my resources, including money, potential raid guild, etc., that means Horde side, Runetotem (PvE), period. I have a 65 Paladin on Horde side, Gorefiend (PvP), but he’s been stripped of everything but his actual gear, and has no guild, etc. Vote how you will, just keep that information in mind.

4) Discuss your votes! If you’re voting a certain way, you may be hoping others vote the same way too… tell them why you voted the way you did and you may end up swinging some votes your way

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Moo baby!

deekow — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:04:19 +0000

This is where the magic is gonna happen…