Niggles

Each of the posts I've made on this blog so far have turned out much longer than intended - this happens to me a lot :p But this will be short, I promise.

There are several things in the game that make me grind my teeth in irritation every time they come up. I know that just about everyone has this reaction to the misspelling of "rogue" as "rouge", but there are others! (And I'm not really counting other examples of misspelling, much as it irritates me, because I realise that some people find spelling really difficult.) For me the two biggest ones are "draenei" and "Outland". With "draenei" it's the pronunciation - it's very clear from the opening voiceover when you CREATE a draenei that it's pronounced DRANN-eye rather than DRAIN-eye. Yet just about everyone gets it wrong. I hadn't realised how much this annoyed me until I started listening to WoW podcasts (I only listen to two, and they're great, but this one thing drives me mad. Although they can't pronounce "shaman" either, most of the time, which is almost as annoying (to be fair, I think it CAN be pronounced either way, but I think SHAR-man is more correct), and one of the presenters on one of the shows can't pronounce - well, anything!)

With "Outland" it's the fact that it's NOT "OUTLANDS". Yet many, many people refer to it in the plural form. I never dare say anything, but it annoys me every single time. Other similar niggles: let's see... Use of "shadow labs" annoys me. I'm fine with "shadow LAB" or "SL" but it's short for LABYRINTH, not labyrinths, as far as I know. Also, Mana-Tombs without the hyphen. This didn't annoy me at all until I read on WoW Wiki that "although the instance itself is called Mana-Tombs, the entrance area outside the portal is called Mana Tombs without the dash". I know it's quite unreasonable of me to get annoyed by this, because the chances of other people having noticed this fact are minimal. So I'd never mention it - but it annoys me!

There are a few abbreviations that annoy me too. DM always annoys me, because it always meant Deadmines to me, until suddenly everyone else started using it for Dire Maul. (If I'd ever DONE the whole of Dire Maul I might have got the hang of this, but as it is I think of Deadmines first if someone says "DM".) SV is a recent one, because although it's obviously "steamvault" (note to those who aren't sure: that's not plural either, plus it's ONE WORD and has a "the"....) my mind always insists on interpreting it as "Shadowmoon Valley". And - this is a silly one - OMW. I *know* it's "on my way", but my mind ALWAYS reads it as "oh my word!" I hate my mind :p

Oh, and while I'm doing niggles, I may as well confess that I also really, really hate: the word "gratz"; people who announce EVERY SINGLE DING; people who use game-specific slang (e.g. "imba") at every possibile opportunity; people who use any of the following: m8, l8r, pls, thx....

If you're a friend of mine and you do any of these things (I mention this because lots of them do!), I can forgive you because I love you, and I know *I'm* far more annoying than any of you, if we're keeping score. But if you're a stranger - PARTICULARLY one who calls me "m8" - you are *not* going to endear yourself to me this way.

This is already longer than I'd intended, but there is one more that's a perennial niggle but is in a different category to the others. It's the rested XP. It says, if you hover over the XP bar, something like "you are rested - 200% of experience gained from killing monsters". Yet every time I kill a monster, I only get 150%! And this is the case even if I've got WEEKS of rest. It does go correctly back to only 100% when I'm NOT rested, but as soon as I am - 150% again. Is this just me? I'm amazed no-one else has made a fuss about this, if not. (To be specific, it's things like "spider dies, you gain 500 XP (+ 250 XP rested bonus)". That's not 200%, it's 150%.)

Next time - I complain about the alphabet :p