Just Potatoes

Recently, I found my teen daughter voice chatting to folks in the MMO she plays the most – Mabinogi. She has some real life friends who play, and some others that they’ve met online.

The thought of her voice chatting with people that she didn’t know made me uncomfortable, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with it in a way that didn’t make me seem hypocritical. (While there are things that are non-negotiable, I try to be a thoughtful parent and mindful of how it was to be a teen.) After all, I use voice chat regularly, and some of the folks that I played WoW and Warhammer with have become great real life friends.

Fortunately, she’s an absolutely awesome kid, and understood my discomfort. I asked her to just hold off on voice chatting while I thought about it for a while, and we talked a bit about why I felt uncomfortable, and some possible solutions to the dilemma. I know some of the things that have been said to me in vent, and I’d rather not have those things said to my daughter. She knows not to give out personal information about herself online, but once she starts talking, people know that she’s a young girl.

Voice chatting in MMOs is not one of those parenting issues that I can solve by looking at my own upbringing. I have wonderful parents, but this just wasn’t something they had to deal with. Maybe the 80s equivalent would have been calling random people on the phone and chatting with them? Yeah. That wouldn’t have gone over well.

Mom... Those gloves SOOOO don't match that outfit!

I have a good friend with a gaming teen. Her son is a little older than my daughter, and he’s a great kid. He’s also got two level 80s in a raid guild in WoW, so I knew that they’d probably dealt with the voice chat issue. She explained that they’d disallowed using vent for a while, until their son proposed paying for the server himself, so he could set the rules and control who came into vent. That solution has worked out really well for them.

Together, my daughter and I ended up making two decisions. First, she would only use voice chat with her real life friends. They’re the only people she wanted to talk to in anyway, but other people kept jumping in. I may end up paying for the vent server so she can control who’s on. Secondly, she started playing EQ2 with me. She wants a challenging MMO experience with loads of content and rich lore. She’s been having a blast, role-playing, level locking to work on crafting and exploring all the areas in each tier. While she goes off to do her own thing in Norrath, I feel better about being connected to what she’s doing.

This week, in EQ2, I got freaked out by sharks, giggled at by crazy skeletons, ganged up on by creepy little dolls and found a magic lamp with a pissed off genie inside. I also navigated a ship safely to shore, saved a village of frog people, uncovered a demonic plot, and went beer shopping for the Avatar of Below. I’m kind of a big deal in Norrath…

I have a shark phobia, and fighting these guys is the single scariest thing I've ever done in a video game. Even the Lost Souls in Doom didn't freak me out this much...

Okay, maybe not…

I continue to be amazed at the sheer amount of content in EQ2, and how much care has gone into some of the most out of the way things!

While EQ2 has (more than) it’s fair share of “kill ten rats” quests, it also has a surprising variety of puzzles, instanced encounters, clever dialogue and secret discoveries. You never quite know what to expect when you find some random clickable thing in the wilderness.

EQ2 gives players the ability to “lock” their level and turn off experience gain, while still earning Alternate Advancement points, an interesting concept that makes it possible for the older content to remain relevant. Some guilds level lock their characters at each tier to complete all the raid/endgame content at that level before moving on to the next expansion tier. Other raid guilds utilize EQ2’s mentoring system, which allows a player to temporarily lower their level to match earlier content.

For my WoW playing friends, this would be the equivalent of a raid guild that stopped leveling at 60, did all the vanilla WoW raid achievements at the level they were intended for, and then moved on to 70 to work through all the Burning Crusade stuff. It’s a great opportunity for me to experience all the raid content that I’ve missed.

These guys would be lost without me.

My little Fury is currently level 51, and leveling quickly, despite having my Alternate Advancement slider set to reroute about 40% of my earned experience into AA points. (AA points are spent in a variety of “trees” to improve my characters abilities and statistics.) I’ll probably hit 60 just about the same time as the rest of the guild is ready to move on to level 70, which should give me some good opportunities to learn how to play my character in a group before trying to raid with her. She’s just got an insane amount of buttons, so I’m a little nervous about actually trying to heal with her. But hey, it’ll be a challenge.

I do miss my PvP (I’m a killer-socializer, according to the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology), so I’m thinking about creating an alt that I can jam through to 80 just for the battlegrounds (if SOE ever gets them working… *sigh*). But I’m thoroughly enjoying EQ2, so I don’t plan on picking up anything else any time soon.

Choose wisely! (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, anyone?)

On the “in other news” front… Tickets for the LFG Expo in June go on sale on my birthday (March 26th). It looks like it’s going to be awesome! And it’s here in Minneapolis!! Woo hoo!

I have another stamp in my MMO passport this month… Everquest II.

After thinking through what I really want out of my gaming experience in the last post, and spending time playing single player games for a bit, I decided to give EQ2 another shot. I’d played it briefly just prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King, during the pre-expansion lull.

EQ2 has the level of complexity that I’ve been craving, an overall decent commmunity and a fairly rich lore. I’m playing on Antonia Bayle, which is the RP server, and I was so impressed after playing for a month that I actually bought the Collector’s Edition of the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, which won’t surprise anyone who remembers that I’m a sucker for a CE…

So the Collector's Edition mount isn't the most beautiful thing I've ever seen... The graphics really aren't that bad, considering the age of the game.

In the previous post, I mentioned that I enjoyed the leveling experience and the challenge of gearing up a character. I really *want* an uphill course to climb in improving my character. While leveling in EQ2 is fairly easy, the other aspects of character development are where the challenge lies.

A few of the things about EQ2 that I’m enjoying…

• Community – My biggest issue with WoW (and other games) is that I’m a cranky old lady (though I’m known to still laugh at my 4 year old’s potty jokes, soooo….), and I just don’t have the patience to deal with trolls anymore. I can’t read chat in WoW for more than about 10 seconds before getting the overwhelming urge to poke my eyes out. While EQ2’s “1-9 chat” channel, essentially the global channel, can occasionally get a bit silly, it’s the *only* general channel in ANY game that I haven’t needed to turn off soon after logging in.
• Alternate Advancement points – This is part of the complexity of character development. AA points are akin to WoW’s talent points, and you spend them to upgrade skills and obtain new abilities. They’re received independently of your adventuring level, and you get AAs by doing all kinds of things… exploring, killing, questing, collecting stuff, etc. The AA cap at level 90 is 250 points. However, if you just level through to 90, you’ll end up with only a portion of those (someone told me around 100-120 points at level 80 if you jam straight through). In order to be good at your chosen class, you’ll want to earn as many AA points as possible. To this end, there’s an “experience slider” where you can convert portions of earned adventuring experience into AA experience. I absolutely love being able to control my journey through the content like this. It also means that if something is tough for me to do, I can earn more AA and try it again instead of giving up and outleveling it. The AA slider also lets me continue questing in a zone that I’m enjoying, when I might otherwise level out of it quickly. If I want to jam through to max level, I can. If I want to take a slow, leisurely journey through the content, I can. EQ2 feels far less linear than other MMOs I’ve played.
• Dings – So many things “ding” in EQ2. There are adventuring level dings, and AA dings, and collection completion dings, and tradeskill level dings, and the little ding noise you get when you harvest a rare crafting item…
  

  The atmospheric effects are decent, and I look forward to seeing the improved graphics in the newer zones

• Classes – I spent a couple of weeks just trying different classes, and settled on playing a fury, which is an offensive, healing capable druid. I leveled a dirge to level 20 when I’d played previously, which is a bardic, buffing class. I’d like to try a wizard, and one of the tank classes at some point.
• Betrayal – Every race and class is either good, evil or neutral. My fury is a high elf. I’m not sure what I was thinking, other than that all the characters I’d tried had gone through the starting areas for evil races so I should try a “good” character. But if I decide to turn evil, there’s no problem, since EQ2 has a betrayal system allowing the player to switch factions! The betrayal system is well thought out and a really neat feature. I’ve done some of the quests to betray, though I haven’t gone all the way yet. I love how the quest givers subvert the character by convincing them of the flaws of their current faction. I probably will betray eventually just to see that content. Imagine if you were a Horde player in WoW and could quest to convert to the Alliance, or if you were a destruction race in Warhammer and could quest to become Order…
• Chronomancy – I haven’t experienced this one yet, but there are chronomancer NPCs who’ll lower your level temporarily so you can go back and earn XP and AA with quests and instances that you’ve outleveled. There are people who jam through to max level and then use the chronomancer to go back down to earlier content so they can earn those AA points. I have yet to see anything like this is any other game. You can also “mentor down” to a lower level friend so you can quest and instance with them at the same level as they are.
• Crafting – Crafting is not something I generally enjoy. For some reason, I’m getting a real kick out of it in EQ2. Maybe it’s because you ding tradeskill levels. (Apparently, I’m a sucker for a ding?) Starting at level 10, you choose one of three general tradeskill areas – scholar, outfitter and craftsman, and get to experience crafting a wide variety of items. Every character has a tradeskill level as well as an adventuring level, and when your tradeskill level hits 20, you choose a specialization. My fury took tailoring, so I can continue to make my own leather armor upgrades.


I met Antonia Bayle at the Royal Hunting Camp, after uncovering a sinister plot to kill her.

I’m looking forward to hanging out in Norrath some more…