US Airways Flight 1719 – Charlotte to Orlando

I picked up the Captain Sim 757 base pack for FS9 this week, and finally had a chance to try it out last night on a quick flight from Charlotte to Orlando.   (Vataware Flight Link)

I have to say, I’m impressed.

The flight itself was fairly easy, and the plane performed adequately.  I’m not familiar with either the Charlotte or Orlando airports, and changing the arrival runway and approach when requested to do so by ATC was very easy with the FMS.

The only real problem that I had was that I had left the electric hydraulics off accidentally, and remembered as I’m rotating the aircraft.  That was an easy fix, though.  I’ll write it off to being distracted by trying to get the engines started.

The cs757 feels heavy.  I felt that she was really dragging to get off the runway, especially compared to the much lighter A319′s and 737′s I’m used to flying.  It was also a job holding it on the localized and glideslope by hand.  I felt that I had to fight it most of the way in.  I don’t mind doing that, and there was a pretty strong cross-wind component (winds were 280 @ 7kts, and I was coming in on rwy 35L) but it was kinda cool to have to work to keep things lined up.

All in all, the flight went well and for all potential issues with the landing, I ended up landing at 122kts, -164fps – which isn’t too bad at all.

Will the last one to leave Silvermoon…

Growing up near Detroit, there was an old joke floating around in the mid-80′s, as the decline of the auto industry began:

Will the last one to leave Detroit, please remember to turn off the lights?

Having rolled a toon Horde-side on Thorium Brotherhood, I feel the same way about Silvermoon right now.  The place is abandoned.  Not virtually abandoned – literally abandoned.

Last half-dozen times I’ve been online, I’ve done a /who silvermoon as I’ve run through the empty streets.  The results, on average, have been two people – one of them being myself.

This is a shame, as I feel that Silvermoon is one of the nicest cities in Warcraft.  And it didn’t used to be this way, I remember running through TB’s Silvermoon about a year ago and not being able to find a quiet place to sit.

I know that the population on Thorium Brotherhood as dropped significantly.  According to WarcraftRealms.com, it’s down to 9,002 – for both the Horde and Alliance.  Comparatively, Moon Guard has a total population of over 34,000.

Is that all it is, or is this evidence not just that Thorium Brotherhood is no longer an RP realm, but more that the development of Looking for Dungeon and Looking for Raid has reduced cities to just lobbies where we wait for the queue to pop?

I also feel that Blizz could have done a better job with balancing out the capital cities.  I think it was a poor decision to only make Reforging/Transmogrification available in Stormwind or Ogrimmar.  Same with portals to all the new Cata zones.  Or, at least, if you’re going to do that then they should have had portals setup to all the other capital cities, as they once did in Shattrath.

Hopefully, some of this will be fixed in MoP.  In the meantime, though, I’ve got Silvermoon to myself.

Cross-Realm Raiding!

So Blizzard has finally given us Cross-Realm Raiding!  So I can go hang out with my old raid friends in the Firelands, without having to transfer out of my RP Guild on Moon Guard.

This will be awesome!  It will make raiding fun again!  There will be Unicorns, and Candy, and Magic, and Happiness!

Um. Yeah. Not Really.

While cross-realm raiding is cool, it is still raiding – and I’m still sick of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I miss my raiding friends.  And I’m happy that I can help them out from time to time – but, for some crazy reason, I expected it to be magically better.  Like, we’d walk in and all the bosses would die of fright at our mere presence.

Instead, it was almost exactly the same.  And more than anything else, it just confirmed for me that I really am mostly over raiding.

I say mostly over, because I also had a headache last night; was exhausted; and my kids needed me to help with some school stuff all at the same time – and I couldn’t even get in vent until after the raid had ended.  So I’m sure those all factored into my poor experience as well.  In fact, I debated for a long time about whether to even say ‘Yes, I can go’.

Maybe, then, the real lesson is more that I need to say ‘No.’ on those nights that I really just don’t feel it, so that when I do go, I’m looking forward to it and having fun.