Festival - Your Noodle Cart Making Friend

In case you missed it Pandaren Treasure Noodle Carts are the latest hot thing in World of Warcraft dining. It's great, they serve everyone the soup they need for raid buffs and are fun too.

There's quite a quest chain to go through to learn how to make them, but it's nothing compared to the complexity of creating the cart kits themselves. See to make a cart you need 6 different types of meals, and 5 of those meals require 4 different ingredients in the form of pepper or rice, vegetable, fish, and meat. So each time you want to make a cart you have to see if you have 5 of each kind of meal, if not check the ingredients for that meal and see if you have the 1 rice/pepper, 5 fish, 5 meat, and 25 vegetable required to make it. This is a lot of brain power if you aren't sitting around with 24 different kinds of materials in your bag while poking at your cooking interface.

In TTGF we have a pot luck kind of food thing going on. People dump mats into tab 3 of the guild bank and they're turned into the various foods required. Folks are more than happy to use their cooking tokens on ingredients for sale by Nam Ironpaw in Halfhill, but they need to know what to use them on. Even though our bank gets organized pretty regularly it's still difficult to tell what all is in there, and not all of those pieces are even used for the Treasure Noodle Carts.

Nobody Ever Eats the White Foods

Initially I just bugged Lyon about what we needed, because it was a hassle to figure out. Then I got off my duff and made a spreadsheet google doc that everyone could edit. It was still a pain to look up each ingredient and fill out the spreadsheet to see what was missing, but at least it had some math in there to automate things a little bit. As soon as I got that sorted out, I immediately went to Corveroth, our resident "there has to be a better way" guy, and asked if he could devise an addon to let us see information in game. Corv really stepped up to the plate and made this addon that I love called Festival.

What Festival does is look at your bags and guild bank to see what you have in the way of mats. It will show you how many treasure noodle carts you have already, how many of the dishes you have prepared that go into them, and also the individual mats needed to make those dishes.

The color coding is quite simple. The goal is always to make more noodle carts. So the first thing Festival does is see which of the meals you have the most of and divide that quantity by 5. It uses that as the target value because each recipe creates 5 of a meal. If the current plus creatable count for any other meal is greater than 80% of the target, the item is colored green. If that count is less than 20% of the target, it's colored red. Otherwise it's yellow.

Hey TTGF, we need Scallions.

So when you see a meal or ingredient showing green those are low priority for restocking. When you have several meals that are green and one that is red, the red one is where those cooking tokens should be spent. If everything is green it's time to make some noodle carts to clear out those mats filling up your bank.

Festival is installed like any other addon and will open a tab to the right of your guild bank automatically. You can also toggle it on and off with a small button on the upper right area of the guild bank. You can open Festival at any time using the slash commands /festival or /fest. You can see when the last scan was underneath Festival at the top, and the little yellow arrow in the upper right will quickly scan the whole guild bank again.

If you try Festival I'd love to hear what you think. I think it's fantastic. It has made Noodle Carting much easier to manage. You can download Festival from WowInterface.

Technicality

Okay, I guess it isn't a Punch Cannon, it's a Punch Tank that has a cannon also.

I present from the Art of World of Warcraft panel, the Heavy Mortar. I quote Eric Browning (Lead Prop Artist) who you can hear around the 5:27 mark of the panel video, if you have the virtual ticket.

It punches! It's a tank and it punches! Cause it's not enough to shoot somebody, you can punch 'em.

(It's a Punch Cannon)

My Button Done Got Pushed

Ok, I've just about had it. As a mother who stays home to take care of her kids while her husband goes to work, people being upset over Aggra's role in Warlords of Draenor is starting to piss me off. Yes she's fiction, but if she chose to stay at home and take care of her kids that doesn't make her less of a bad ass. It means she had a different plan for her life than you think you would have in her place.

I do like a lot of the discussion that I've seen. I think it could have been a great story if she did go with Thrall to Draenor, or even in his stead. I don't really like the idea of them carting a kid along with them, but parents do what they have to do, so it could work I suppose. I'd worry they were just setting us up to see the kid die to motivate our heroes, so that's my biggest reservation on that idea.

I'm not saying that you can't WANT Aggra to go back into battle. I'm most assuredly not saying that we don't need more bad ass women in the game, on the packaging, in the marketing, and wearing armor comparable to a male performing the same job.

What I'm saying is that when you start whining that she's being lessened as a person for staying back to take care of her kids, that her role as a stay at home parent hurts you? Well you know what? That hurts me, or at least makes me grumpy.

I think the off the cuff remarks made during the Blizzcon panel, referring to the "boys trip" and "end of the honeymoon" were unfortunate. I looked at my computer screen when he said that and thought "you Sir, are a dumb ass*" and also "wtf?" The idea that Thrall would just be done with his family and decide it was time for adventure is somewhat juvenile.

My point is, while you're pushing for Blizzard to see your point of view and what you'd like to see happen in the game, try and remember to consider that of others too. World of Warcraft is a big place, and there is a lot of room for a lot more women in it, and it's okay if some of them are just moms.

*In general I don't think he's a dumb ass, but that was how I felt at that moment when the words were said.

Why Time Travel Doesn't Matter

One of the things that kept being repeated over the course of Blizzcon was that the story of Warlords of Draenor will not focus on time travel. Time travel happens, but it's not THE story.

This seems to bother some folks, and this is my take on why it shouldn't.

Garrosh went back in time to rally the warlords to his cause, unite them into a war machine that could come kill all of us. Someone over there engages the Dark Portal that will allow that war machine to come into our present Azeroth and that sucks, so we have to go stop them. This involves us traveling back in time to stop them.

But several things are important:
Garrosh isn't changing our past, he's forging a new separate path from our past, parallel.
We don't go further back in time to stop him, we go to when he is as the portal opens.*
That past and our present are linked together in a way that makes them basically both our present.

If you look at Warlords of Draenor and slap different names on everything you could ignore the time travel component completely.

Garrosh went to planet Xenoth and amassed an army, teaching them how to make fantastic bombs and cannons that can punch you. Then someone opened a door to let punch cannons come attack us on Azeroth. We go to planet Xenoth and meet up with other folks who don't like Garrosh either, and they become our allies in the fight.

That's the same story, right? Just different names to the characters and places.

Time travel was used to explore the history of Draenei and Orcs in game, and let us play in their world pre-destruction. It lets them bring back old big bads that maybe they regret killing, and big heroes that we haven't played along side of.

I don't see why the actions that we take in Warlords are any less meaningful than any other expansion. We will win, because it's what we do, it is what we always do. It's not like it's predetermined that we'll win because obviously we're here so they didn't defeat us 30 years ago, because that isn't our past. For all intents and purposes it's just a different planet. It is a "What If" planet, but honestly the past aspect of it doesn't matter. It's just there for them to play around with the story.

And I believe that's what the devs meant by time travel not being the story...

*Ok, I'm not sure on that but it seems reasonable.