A Guide For Every Season

This post was sparked by a thread that popped up over at the Guild Wars 2 Guru forums.

(I know, I know, it is a cesspool compared to the official forums, which aren’t much of an improvement either, but drama at a distance is sometimes entertaining and one gets the occasional news/valuable tidbit that one has not heard about.)

Some guy asked for a leveling guide from 1-80 for Guild Wars 2.

Of all the-

I don’t even-

Hello? This is an MMO with a completely FLAT leveling curve! It’s meant to take an average of 1.5h per level.

It is clearly marked on the map which zones are appropriate to which level range.

Which is infinitely more sensible than a list going Plains of Ashford 1-15, Diessa Plateau 15-25, etc. because you don’t even see or know the name of the zone on the map until you venture into it.

The game downlevels you in any zone you’re too high leveled for, so that there is some difficulty/challenge remaining. You can practically go anywhere if you don’t like the proposed paths.

Hell, if you don’t want go anywhere and have other characters to be your materials supplier and gold daddy, you can CRAFT your way from 1-80. (Refer to ubiquitous crafting guides online, I suppose.)

Guides That Are Really Walkthroughs

Of all the ‘guides’ that pop up for various games, I honestly fail to understand leveling guides the most. What kind of person requires someone else to hold his hand, set his goals for him and tell him exactly where to go on each step of his journey to max level? Is it that hard to figure it out for yourself?

This is a rant against those who don’t want to think for themselves, who eschew discovery and learning, slavishly following other people’s instructions on how to do something.

There is an amazing number of them, just going by the number of hits I get on my page that is a simple map and directions and answers the questions “How do I get to Blue Mountain in The Secret World?” I fail to see how someone moving around the map doing quests can miss the Blue Mountain exit, but evidently, people do.

Little wonder why people put up all kinds of crap guides on websites, lace them with tons of ads to generate revenue, and let the Googling masses loose upon them.

Guides That Are Really Cheats

The countering defense to this is that for some people, they say that they are looking for guides that will show them the optimal path. They’re on a search for efficiency, the speedrun way.

A little questioning in the thread I brought up reveals that the original poster really wants, not just a leveling guide, but a FAST leveling guide, a power-leveling method. He wants to get his alt to 80 as uber duper quick as possible. He wants to find those weak spots of a game, such as a continually respawning dynamic event that will yield an abnormally higher rate of xp than the average, or perhaps mobs that return lots of experience to farm, and so on.

To me, it sounds like he’s looking for someone to share (ok, too kind a word, to give) knowledge of a near-exploit or a loophole for rushing to max level as fast as possible.

Putting aside the ‘why rush headlong into boredom and burnout quicker’ retort for now, we run into the ‘how stupid do you think those in the know are, that they will share this with you in a public setting, so that the developers can close it in the next patch?’

Little tip: Follow the bots. The gold farmers know where to be. It’s more than a game to them, it’s their livelihood. They -know-. And because of the way xp sharing works in this game, you can make use of their leet multiboxing hax skillz to kill stuff at a vastly accelerated pace.

Caveat: The above tip segues immediately into the ‘how much do you value your account’ argument, because ArenaNet is pretty fond of the banhammer for stuff they deem as exploiting and 72h suspensions for mere infractions, and they don’t even have to worry about losing your sub fee.

TL;DR: Follow my tongue-in-cheek suggestion at your own risk.

Guides That Are Really Guides (And Those That Are Not)

Ok, we cannot expect everyone to be number-crunchers or systems explorers, so there is some validity to the argument that writing guides that explain numbers and stats, esoteric knowledge, and shares and teaches strategies and general philosophies are kosher on the quest for the holy grail of min-maxing.

I don’t actually have an issue with guides per se. Especially if they are written with an intent to teach, or share, or discuss strategies or builds or what-have-you.

I tend to have a small issue with guides written like they are the be-all and end-all of all possible knowledge and treat-me-like-holy-writ-or-else, but I suppose if authors need that egomaniacal boost in order to get them to write in the first place, we can give them a little leeway for that.

But I do have big issues with people who do take them verbatim and everybody else is WRONG and we must all DO IT THIS WAY or else the sky will fall down and the earth will be swallowed in a pit of hellfire.

And there are an amazing number of people who don’t want to think and just want to follow someone else’s checklist or directions or list of ingredients or goals. Why in the world is that the case?

I don’t understand leveling guides, I think I’ve said that before. I find it terrifying to think that someone needs to be led around by the nose in this fashion. How are they going to manage more complex parts of the game? Find more walkthroughs? Pay someone to play for them?

I’ve taken a look at the odd crafting guide before, mostly from WoW, and some from GW2. A lot are just shitty terse checklists. From X to Y, do this. From Y to Z, do that. The only valuable thing in them is possibly that someone has counted up the number of materials you’ll need beforehand so that you can gather them first or buy them wholesale from an auction house, and one has to block a whole lot of ads to get that one sentence.

Probably the most comprehensive guide I’ve seen on the subject is an LOTRO guide for the Scholar, which besides an FAQ, includes suggested crafting node locations, though there is a hell of a lot of ingredient lists that are probably better off on a wiki somewhere.

I could point to the ATITD wiki for what proper crafting guides should look like, but practically no other game has that kind of complexity. Maybe Puzzle Pirates.

See, the really cool thing about this sort of guide is that even after reading it, it is not an instant “I win” button, you still have to put in time and practice to increase one’s performance, armed with better knowledge.

If, after reading a guide, you could program a bot or get your cat or parrot to do it and still attain 100% success, something is dreadfully wrong somewhere. I’m not sure if one should blame the game’s design, or blame the majority for wanting mindless button-pushing achievement.

A Guide By Any Other Name

I guess part of the problem is that every player’s definition of what is a useful guide differs.

I assume that people write and make the guides that they themselves would prefer. Which doesn’t bode well for the theory of crowd intelligence or humanity as a whole, given the number of cheats and straight up walkthroughs out there.

Either that, or they take the lazy way out and write down the least amount of words necessary, which boils down to a terse laundry list of “go here” “do that.”

Maybe the lazy man’s guide explanation is why there are so many unedited video ‘guides’ which are just playthroughs of a particular sequence. Extracting benefit is left as an exercise for the viewer to manage for themselves, which can be either slavishly aping what has been done, or pulling out the general principles to understand, utilize and possibly apply elsewhere.

Perhaps ‘a magician never reveals his secrets’ may be a reason why some people just write out the bare bones of what to do in order to gain the desired end result. They know that that’s what most people just care about, and in that way, they keep the superior edge of true knowledge.

But it really bugs me that so many people just care about the ends, and couldn’t care less about the means. This is why we have gold-sellers, why we have folks asking ‘where is the loot’ and looking for the next developer created shiny carrot to lead them on to the next, following guides written or filmed by other people.

Taken to an extreme, one may as well sell one’s copy of the game and just watch other people play the game from start to end for you on Youtube. Gaming as spectator sport.

Why? People, why? How special does it make you feel, if none of it is really what you accomplished on your own?

It’s borrowed fame. It’s pretense.

I can understand not wanting to reinvent the wheel from time to time, or even ‘skipping content’ to get to the good bits (though I personally think you’re skipping faster to burnout) now and then, but it’s so easy to run right down the slippery slope of not-wanting-to-do-anything-at-all-without-a-guide-showing-you-how.

TL;DR: Use Guides in Moderation

Ranting aside, at the end of the day, I guess I have to come to one of those Zen conclusions you tend to find on my blog.

Guides, like guns, are tools. It’s how you use them that really matters.

The objective and the intent behind using the guide is a big deal, and can lead to healthy or unhealthy consequences.

A little bit of self-discipline goes a long way to using them properly, and the lack of it leads to lazy dependency and misuse.

When in doubt, anything taken to an extreme is nuts.

Go play, and have fun.

ATITD: The Bijou (and Gem-Cutting)

Before I played this game, I had no idea such a word existed. And to be honest, I only looked up the definition when writing this post.

bi·jou [bee-zhoo, bee-zhoo]

noun, plural bi·joux

1. a jewel.

2. something small, delicate, and exquisitely wrought.

Etymology: 1660s, from Fr. bijou, from Breton bizou “(jeweled) ring,” from bez “finger” (cf. Cornish bisou “finger-ring,” 13c.)

Welp, learn something new every day.

Despite my ignorance of many things French, the Test of the Bijou produces one of my favorite minigame puzzles to play in A Tale in the Desert.

You are presented with a target gem cut to achieve (top left, on the sticks.) A cuboidal gem sits on the Scholar’s Gem Cutting Table. Your job? Cut the gem to match the target gem cut.

Essentially, bijous (the player-created puzzles) are like training wheels for the skill of gem-cutting.

Similar to blacksmithing in ATITD, which involves actually hammering polygons towards a target shape and allows for true player skill development (unlike typical wussy progress-bar increment blacksmithing in most MMOs – I’ll cover blacksmithing in a future post, in the meantime, you can check out Van Hemlock’s old old post about it which first got me involved with the game), gem-cutting involves cutting (or subtracting) away at polygons until you reach the desired shape.

I find gem-cutting slightly easier than blacksmithing, in the sense that the cuts are more predictable and less pixel-finicky.

What’s less fun is that mistakes cannot be taken back. If you cut wrongly, that’s it, you’ve screwed up, and you’re one cuttable gem down.

Cuttable gems are obtained by waiting around for a water mine to spit one up every ~4-20 minutes (definitely on the longer side most of the time) and there are seven types (that the mine appears to rolls randomly from) so waiting for the exact type you want can be an exercise in significant patience and time.

Gem cutting is also reliant somewhat on luck. The cuttable gem you start out with has a defined set of flaws, and certain gem cuts must have flaws in some pattern to achieve. If the gem you placed on the table didn’t have those flaws, tough luck, you can’t cut that gem, go look for another best possible gem cut to make with the existing gem and try again with the next gem.

Bijous shortcut all that. You’re guaranteed that the gem it presents you with is one that you can achieve the solution at the end. And you don’t need a cuttable gem to start a bijou puzzle, nor do you get any product from it. All you get is some satisfaction and a little better at gem-cutting.

The best guide to gem-cutting that I’ve found so far is on the Tale 3 wiki page here. (This may not be obvious to many new players, but the later wikis Tale 4-6 sometimes take shortcuts with explanations because the veterans are already quite familiar. I find browsing back to the Tale 2 and 3 wikis can sometimes provide a clearer explanation to newbies just gettingthe  hang of things.) There was even a school in Tale 3 that set up a bunch of bijou tables to teach gem-cutting to people, which makes me wish I was clued into ATITD a lot sooner.

But well, we do the best with what we have. Some day, I’ll work through that immense list of gem cuts. For now, I’ve just about progressed to the point of being halfway competent at basic cuts and able to solve bijous like these.

First off, orientation. People normally stand facing Disc 1 like so. There are three discs. Disc 1 does a complete horizontal or vertical slice in the same plane as the saw disc showing.

Disc 2 does a kind of diagonal slice. And disc 3 does the other kind of “angled” diagonal slice.

(The technical wiki explanation for those who find it more helpful: Each disc will remove all the outermost vertices along a plane. Disc 1 removes the left side of the gem. Disc 2 removes the diagonal plane touching on the upper and front sides of the gem. Disc 3 removes the diagonal plane touching on the upper, front, and right sides of the gem. )

Me, I just got turned around by the wiki after a while. You have to try it to get the feel of it.

Rotating the gem is also a “by feel” thing for me. The J and K keys rotate the gem left and right. Technically, this is “rotating the gem along the Z axis” as pictured by my cruddy diagramming above.

U and I rotate the gem up and down, or ahem, “rotating the gem along the Y axis.”

The last set of keys O and L rotate the gem left and right along the unseen faces in the picture above (or “along the X axis” for those more comfortable with 3d modelling terminology.)

Now that we can move the gem around, we can get to cutting:

Step 1 – Find the flaw that matches the target gem cut

The target gem cut as pictured above has that particular shaped flaw. Rotate the cube about looking for it.

Here I’ve already sped things along by showing it in the picture… except it doesn’t quite match up. There’s some other ugly flaws in the way.

This calls for a straight slice from Disc 1.

Tada! That looks a lot more like it. Just um, upside down.

We can fix that. Rotate rotate.

Step 2 – Cut away excess layers to approach the target shape

We don’t need the other stuff in the way, so disc 1 to the rescue again, keep rotating the gem to face unwanted planes to the saw and trim it down to the appropriate size.

Wheeee! Done?

No, I lied. I didn’t show you the other camera angle yet.

This target gem cut actually has 4 symmetrical “angled diagonal” faces behind.

Step 3 – Choose the correct blade and trim the other faces to match.

This always throws me off, I’m just about getting better at it, choosing between disc 2 and disc 3. In this case, I made a guess that disc 3 would be the appropriate one and did a hail mary cut.

Phew. It was the right blade. Now that face matches.

From here, it was a matter of rotating and using the same blade to clean up the other three sides.

In similar vein to the other thought tests, I won’t show the final steps, but it’s quite easy from here. I’ve also gone into a bit more detail with showing you all this bijou ‘solution’ because frankly, it’s a lot easier described than done. A good part of the challenge is in the gem manipulation, managing camera angles,  and the not accidentally over-cutting

Here’s a peek at another bijou:

See the flaws and the shape of where the target gem cut should lie?

Trust me, it’s easier when I show the correct face to you here, rotating to look for it from six possible faces is a bit less easy.

What disc(s) should be used to chop it to its super duper thinness?

Disc 1 was the correct answer, getting rid of all the stuff behind it essentially. Now which other disc to clear the remaining junk?

That would be last disc we haven’t used in this post as yet.

And soon after that… done.

One more recognized bijou, and one more level.

ATITD: The Midnight Digs and Stir

The next part of the saga:

Step 2) Obtain Cement and Plaster

My alarm clock worked. Fortunately, it was the 3am-7am stretch in between Saturday and Sundays so very little overall harm done to the rest of my life, just sleep in a little longer.

(Yes, I am crazy enough to pull off these marathon overnights – one gets used to it being on the other side of the pond from the Americans, and I actually like the wee morning hours. They’re peaceful.

My geographic location is also one of the reasons I’m very leery of game mechanics that cause too much group overcommitment to time schedules. I know my personality is hardcore obsessive enough to get greedy and crazy addicted if I don’t watch it all the time and correct it instantly like a bad puppy.

Now and then I consciously do it as a once in a blue moon thing, trading off lack of sleep for profit, but I wouldn’t want to make it a habit EVERY effing week.)

a) Attend Gypsum Dig

Five minutes before 3am (3pm EST to normal people), run over to the scheduled spot in the far west of Egypt in Valley of Kings.

I cut it this close because I was sitting on 9 days of travel time that I didn’t mind burning off on instant travel at Chariot Stops. If one doesn’t have the travel time to burn, factor in at least 15-30 minutes to get to a location, because you’ll be waiting for 3-5 minutes in between Chariot Stops for the free travel option.

These group digs and activities are organized by one of the more famous names in ATITD, Rabble, who hosts these things pretty much out of the kindness of his heart. And for the benefit of the ATITD society as a whole – because without these things, people would reach stuck points and quit (or gather in clique-y groups) and  erode away at the community atmosphere. He’s awesome.

I believe for sandboxes to stabilize into lawfulness, you -need- a few of these benevolent leader types to appear and get people organized as a big group and keep things welcoming for newbies. I hear Ultima Online had some of these, and ATITD also spawns a notable number of them.

(Generosity and respect also feeds forward and back. No doubt if Rabble ever needed help with anything, a ton of people would drop whatever they were doing and rush to help out.

It’s the rare MMO game that manages these sorts of iterated prisoner’s dilemmas that build trust though. Too often, people only face one interaction with each other, and the rational thing is for people to defect for profit and screw the group.

In ATITD, you’ll only pull it off once, then your reputation will be soured for good. And the game is built such that you need to check back in periodically with the group to keep succeeding – you can still solo and meander off as a hermit if you want to, but you’ll get there a lot faster if people don’t hate you and if you accept help from the group now and then. It’s a fantastic balance the game mechanics have set up – seriously incomparable to any other game I’ve encountered so far.)

Sidetrek aside, er yeah, dig. Dig dig dig. This is ATITD’s version of a group-based activity for shared profit, aka a raid? One of them anyhow.

The actual mechanics are kinda boring. Some guy selects a menu option to Dig a Hole. Everyone else stands around the hole, clicks on the hole, and gets one option to Dig Deeper. Stand by and keep clicking it as much as your stats will let you. Endure for however long the dig lasts.

Like most things in ATITD, we can deconstruct it a bit further to find more interesting interrelated connections.

How many times you can click, and how fast, is determined by your stats. Endurance, specifically, for digging.

The stat color changes from black to dark red to bright red per click until you can no longer click when it’s bright red. The speed at which it recovers back to black is based on the numerical value on the right.

The numbers in brackets are your base stats. (Mine suck, I know. You can steadily affect your base stats by working on a myriad multitude of various Tests or minigame activities, which I treat in a fairly laissez-faire manner, nice bonus to have, but not critical. Others actively work on improving them. Your mileage may vary.)

The numbers on the left are your current stats, as affected by a bunch of things that can temporarily move stats up or down. Primarily, through Cooking. Recipes of various ingredients can be concocted for various stat increases – there’s always the tradeoff of lower stats for other things, so the trick is to lower stats you don’t currently need. Cooking requires its own set of extremely long posts to do it justice, so that’s all I shall say about it here. For this specific dig, Rabble makes up his own food for everyone, and people eat from the kitchens as directed. You can also get smaller stat bonuses through smelling Incense (which here is also provided by the dig host), and drinking from Aqueducts and various other stuff.

The shovel you use also has an effect on how effectively you dig – which can range from simple slate shovel technology which breaks a lot in the early game to professionally smithed high quality 9k+ or 9.5k+ shovels that can be given unique names by the player smith.

Standing in one spot and repeated clicking is a job best suited for macros, not humans (not if they don’t want Repetitive Strain Injury anyhow.) It’s fascinating to see how ingenious the macros are. You -could- just have a macro that clicks on the spot chosen every X number of seconds, but that’s so inelegant.

The trusty R-Cubed macro I use has a second function built in. See that “uncheck for skill” option? Uncheck it.

Now when you start the macro, it’ll ask you to hold ctrl and hover the mouse cursor over the stat. You want to pick out the stat when it is bright red (as shown when the eye color changes to bright red.) So dig dig manually a few times until you’re exhausted, and find the perfect pixel location over the letters for bright redness. Release ctrl when you’ve got it.

Then it’ll ask you to select the location where you want it to click by again holding ctrl and releasing over the correct spot. Pin down the menu (so that it doesn’t disappear when you click on it) for digging as shown in the first dig picture above, and move the mouse cursor to somewhere in the centre of the words. Release ctrl.

See how elegant it is? Now when it detects the bright red color changing (aka you have recovered enough endurance to dig again), it will move the mouse cursor to the spot you have selected, and click the dig option for you.

The same macro can be used for anything that functions similarly, eg. limestone collecting, etc.

Dig participants have it easy. Dig pickers, the other role in the dig, don’t. Once the digs reach a certain threshold, every subsequent dig tosses out the desired items. Cuttable stones and medium stones come up in most digs.

Gypsum and bauxite digs are done in the far west and east of Egypt respectively, after some time of digging a hole in those locations, the hole progresses from primarily throwing out stones to bags of gypsum or lumps of bauxite.

All those items need to be picked up. The role of the dig picker is to keep clicking on them and keep watching your avatar bend awkwardly at the waist picking them over and over and keep clicking on them some more. Everything is pooled at the end to be distributed out evenly to all in the group.

In theory anyway. Depending on the dig, the only people allowed to be pickers may be those most trusted to be able to release their haul again (and not run off or vanish, never to be seen again.) I believe this is more of a concern in the early game, where stones are very valuable, and various members of the population have not yet been established a regular commitment to the game.

By this point in the Telling, pretty much only the cooperative members remain and you’d probably be shooting yourself in the foot by acting up at one of Rabble’s digs anyway. In addition to ruining your rep, being rejected from any further group activities and the population as a whole, there are also Demipharoahs in Egypt now. These are members of the player population elected to the role, which gives the ability to perma-ban seven other players. They normally mediate disputes with lots of discussions, but that smoking gun of “permadeath” is always there as a final solution if the griefing behavior is unresolvable.

(This Telling, after a visit by a group of regular griefers, the population of Egypt also developed a new law amendment to the DP’s powers in the form of the Anti-Griefers Act. Afraid that the usual seven bans per DP might not be sufficient to stop their actions, and realizing banning didn’t solve the problem of being able to take down unsightly property, Egypt gave additional power to the DPs by enabling them to seek out a sort of referendum vote from Egypt as a whole to permaban a particular character. This is one of the powerful features of ATITD – players can make up laws, and have them implemented by developer – though the speed of the development is on the whole very slow for non-critical issues. The griefing was a critical issue.)

It’s interesting to note that things usually never escalate to this point except on rare occasions which give rise to history and gossip. The very possibility of punitive punishment existing is a check that helps society to function cooperatively. (Just as you could be punched or attacked in real life if you insulted or pissed off someone, but it rarely happens per social interaction because both people are aware that the possibility exists and moderate their behavior appropriately.)

There’s an interesting difference between the virtual world and real life though – apparently you can’t give the ability for unlimited punitive action to all people, else you’re simply asking for escalation. Someone is bound to test it out, or go nuts with it because they don’t care, or want to grief. And then someone retaliates back, and voila, nuclear war escalation scenario. Nor can you make the chance of success of punitive action contingent on higher stat or skill, because hello botting, and then FFA PvP gank paradise.

I believe there have been a few cases in ATITD history where a DP went nuts, but I wasn’t there for those. Might be interesting to do some wiki research or ask a veteran what happened in those cases some other time.

Sorry, distracted again. Back to the dig. Dig dig. Dig. Pick pick pick pick pick. Rabble’s digs last for an hour. Long enough to accumulate a hefty load of materials to be shared out, short enough to not have everyone turn into a quivering wreck. In some parts of the early game, people do digs to be entirely donated for research, or half-and-half, and some last longer or shorter, it’s all up to the dig host.

In theory, pickers could also skim off from their haul before they pool everything in one place. It would have to be fairly subtle, since it would be very obvious if there is a lower than usual number of materials to go around. And they would have to live with that on their conscience. I have no idea if that sort of secretive cheating does exist, I don’t pick or host digs. Depending on how optimistically or pessimistically you view human society, you can make your own guesses. Personally, given the amount of clicking and picking per hour involved, I wouldn’t sweat it if they got a higher cut out of it.

Everyone lines up in a neat little line at the end of the dig. The dig host goes down the line, giving out the stones and other items to each person. (Most will track who was present at the start of the dig by asking attendees to open up a chat window with them at the start.)

b) Attend Bauxite Dig

Same as before. Just a change of locations. Singing of “Diggy Diggy Hole” is optional.

c) Attend Cement Stir

Another best-done-in-a-group activity (though I was -almost- getting there on my duo, some better stats or another person would have done it), Cement is made from a Clinker Vat filled with 10 Bauxite, 10 Gypsum (hence the digs above) and 800 Clinker (practically free to the point of troublesome when smelting metal ore with Masonry unlocked on your character.)

Strength and endurance are the stats required for stirring. Each stir increments the “doneness” of the Cement a certain percentage points up to 100% when it is done. Each stir has to be made within a given time interval that ranges from 1min 54 seconds at the beginning, to as short as 10-11 seconds as the Cement nears completion.

Tradeoffs yet again. The more people the merrier applies to an extent, since each character can contribute more stirs. But you also have to stir for each person who wants cement done, which does take up time.

In Rabble’s case, he has the leading and organization of these things down pat. It’s a marvel to watch in action. A raid could not be neater. 5 Clinker Vats in a row. Warehouses filled with free Clinker at the back. Bring your own gypsum and bauxite – limited to 50 per person, for one round of stirring. He provides the fuel and water for the Vats to function because he’s that generously awesome.

Open a chat with him when you arrive, and he assigns you a turn number. For every round, the person whose turn number it is goes down the vats in sequence, loading up the 10 bauxite, 10 gypsum and 800 Clinker per Vat.

Everyone else, having eaten the free food to boost strength and endurance stats, crowds around each Vat in turn, stirring like madmen and clicking the option whenever possible.

Because there’s enough people, there is no need to regulate stirs per person. Smaller groups must give sufficient time in between stirs for each person’s stats to recover to keep up the stirs within the time interval dictated by the Clinker Vat. With this number of people, the stirs progress very fast per vat.

There’s just more vats to do, since everyone wants as much cement as possible, and best to efficiently stir more for everyone since we’re all here anyway.

It all progresses with military clockwork precision. A little over an hour and twenty minutes later, everyone goes home with 500 Cement to their name (a lot more than most of us loners have ever seen in one place, let alone owned, as one of the participants commented.)

Not every cement stir or dig goes this well. Nor a City of Heroes Incarnate trial for that matter. A masterful leader makes this sort of thing possible, and a pleasure to attend. They’re just few and far between. If you find one of these selfless folks, remember to thank and acknowledge them (or hug them) every now and then.

Never take them for granted, it’s so easy for these masters of cat herding to get tired or burn out from the thankless task.