Just Potatoes

I’ve gotten a number of messages in recent weeks asking where I’ve been! Thank you all so much for your concern, but everything is just fine. I moved to Minneapolis in August when my husband’s job was relocated, so between unpacking and getting adjusted to our new home, I haven’t had much time to write.

In September, I logged back into Warhammer for the first time since my move and found it felt sadly decayed. My server was like an old building with lots of character, where good memories were once formed, but now past its prime. Most of my guildmates were off playing Age of Conan or Chinese Aion or just biding their time waiting for the western release of Aion. The RvR map showed all tiers solidly locked by Order most of the time, with very few Destruction warbands roaming the RvR lakes. I noticed that morale would deteriorate quickly in the warbands that did venture out. I’d join a warband, they’d decide to take a battle objective or a keep, get rolled or wipe at the keep door, and the warband would dissolve as people found excuses to do other things. Sometimes someone would say, “Let’s go to . Since Order is here, we can take some objectives there.” I suspect Order was probably equally demoralized, because although they owned much of the map most of the time, they rarely seemed to put together an organized fort push. ( I also suspect that a tremendous amount of cross-realming was going on in the later months of my time at War.)

Uhm, sorry, but I play the game to fight. If I wanted to PvE, I’d play a different game. On the other hand, I agree that the lack of server and class balance in Warhammer is disheartening.

According to the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, I’m a Killer/Socializer, with something like 73% Killer and 67% Socializer, which means I enjoy both PvP and hanging out with my friends. When I found out that most of my Warhammer guild, War Seekers, was moving over to Aion, I opted to go with them.

I rolled a chanter, which is a buffer/debuffer class, and as of last night, I’m level 26. I provide some melee dps, but my dps is less than the true melee classes. Instead, my role in a group is to buff my party primarily using aoe buffs called mantras. I can only have 3 mantras up at a time, so part of the challenge is choosing which mantras are best for a given situation, and being aware of when mantras need to be changed on the fly. My other role is to keep my debuffs on the enemy, and to then to offheal as necessary. I have two heals: a HoT and a bigger heal with a long cast time. Clerics, which are the true healing class in Aion, have a wider variety of faster and more mana efficient heals, as well as group heals.

I have lots of criticisms of Aion, but I’ll save those for another post. I *really* didn’t like having to PvE my way through the first 25 levels to get to the PvP portion of the game. It’s absolutely silly to have a PvP focused game make you spend hours grinding. Over and over, I wished there were scenarios, or battlegrounds, or something like Lord of the Rings monster play. If not for vent and legion chat, I probably would have gone nuts grinding. As an RPer, I don’t find the lore as immersive as games like War, WoW, LotRO or AoC. But there are some really good things about Aion too, and I’ll probably get into those at some point as well.

The best part of my Aion experience has been that some of my WoW guildmates joined my War Seekers. While the killer part of me is loving the PvP aspect of Aion, the socializer part of me is having a blast too now that I get to play with my friends from both WoW and War.

This morning…

My husband: I was thinking that we should take these sailcloth curtains with us and put them up in the new master bedroom! The whole room could be sailing themed!

Me: But then it would just be all YOU. I want the room to be a place that reflects both of us.

My Husband: Well then let’s make it… Sailing in the World of Warcraft themed! (Insert “I think I’m so clever” snicker).

/smack

My little Necromancer hit level 37 in Age of Conan, but I haven’t played much over the past week. Part of that is due to preparing for a cross-country move on the 30th, and part of it is because I don’t have any social connections in AoC. I’m at a point where I feel kind of lonely. Global chat is incredibly bad, so I keep my combat tab flipped to the front which makes the game feel very quiet.

Last week, I logged out of AoC, and jumped in Warhammer, where my guild was putting together a warband to defend the Inevitable City against the inevitable push by Order. Within minutes, I was in vent, and in the warband.

As much as I like being able to solo, I’m really a social gamer at heart. If I don’t develop a strong social community within a game, I won’t stick around. As much as I’ve enjoyed playing some other games (Vanguard, DDO, AoC, LotRO), I have a hard time staying with them because I haven’t connected with the community. In smaller games with small communities, like Vanguard, that’s particularly difficult.

I’m also a fairly shy person in games (which is funny because I’m so NOT that way in real life). I don’t enjoying pugging, for the most part, and I don’t have a very thick skin. I need to feel like I’ve got a firm grasp on the mechanics of a game and my class before I jump into a group. That way, it’s no big deal if someone tells me to “l2p” because they’re just being a jerk. But if I’m actually learning to play, or feeling insecure about my abilities, then yeah… it irks.

In WoW, my first character hit 58 unguilded. I was at a point where I knew I’d quit unless I found a good group of people. There was *one* person on my friends list, a mage who asked me for directions a couple of months before, and afterward told me to pop him on my friends list.

I noticed he was a guild called “Shotgun Bunnies,” which seemed like a cool name for a guild, so I sent him a whisper. I was ridiculously nervous! I got a guild invite, and here we are almost three years later. My characters are all still in Shotgun Bunnies and I’m an elder, which is the rank just below the GM. In BC, our little social guild farmed Karazhan, downed Gruul’s a few times, and ventured into Serpentshrine. We had a tough time pulling together a 25 man, but we had a couple of great 10 man groups. We started out as a 10-man raid guild in Wrath, but after farming Naxx, OS and Vault, we fizzled out. A few key people quit the game or drifted off to other things, and a couple of people went to hardcore raid guilds where they could see more 25-man content.

But I still love those guys. For me, they ARE WoW. They’re the only reason I played as long as I did, and the only reason I still log in sometimes. Last year, I went to Blizzcon with one of them (my bud, Alicia). We met another guildie for dinner. We’re all friends on Facebook, and have a running group message thread going where we regularly trade links, chat, insult each other… and lately, talk about the mating habits of turtles. (Yeah… we’re a strange bunch.)

(I meet two of my guildies at Blizzcon 2008. I’m the short one on the left, with the Shotgun Bunnies shirt on.)

When I started playing Warhammer, after switching from Order to Destruction on Phoenix Throne, I shopped around guild adverts in the forums, and checked out lots of guild websites. I finally applied to a guild that I thought would be a good fit, but I’d never applied to a guild before, so that took me out of my comfort zone a bit. They ended up being a really great group of people, and I love playing with them. War Seekers is what largely what keeps me going back to WAR. A group of guildies is moving over to Aion in September, so I suspect I’ll be bouncing back and forth between both games.

It’s funny that in all my time playing MMOs, I’ve only ever really been in two guilds. I’m definitely not someone who enjoys guild hopping!

So now the question is do I like AoC enough to find a guild? I really don’t know.

…You tell your 3 year old to turn off the TV, and he yells, “Time to offline the inhibitors!”

My little necromancer hit 31 tonight, and I’m nearly done with Khopesh Province for a bit.

Leveling is VERY fast and easy, and hasn’t felt grindy at all. I’ve heard it slows down in the mid 70s, but that they’ve put in enough quests to level all the way to 80 without grinding too much. I feel like the pace is pretty solid. I’ve yet to run out of stuff to do. The map markers are a huge help in getting around to someone as directionally impaired as I am.

As a Robert E. Howard fan, I really appreciate the attention paid to the atmosphere of the zones. The music and visuals are great, and the most of the voice acting is stellar. Too bad there’s so little of it outside of Tortage!

I have yet to do any instances. I have the quests for the Black Castle instance, but don’t know that I’ll get in there at any point. I see constant spamming for healers and tanks for instances, so I think once I hit 50 on my necro, I’ll probably roll my free 50 as a healer.

Now my choices are to head to Cimmeria or Aquilonia for a change of scenery…

A couple of days ago, I loaded up Age of Conan again, because Funcom is doing a free two week deal for returning subscribers. There were a lot of things I really liked about AoC, so I’m giving it another shot.

I created a new character (a necromancer) because I…uhm… forgot how to play my Herald of Xotli (*blush*), and although I think melee combat is definitely one of AoC’s strongest elements, I’m enjoying being a caster.

A few notes:
– Global chat population seems split between extremely polite, more mature sounding folks, and teenage boys who probably lied about their age to buy the game. I spend most of my time with the combat tab flipped to front. I wonder how many women play the game and how that compares to other MMOs.

- Why must the “OMG WoW is so much better than this game!” crap show up in the chat channels of every other game? New players need to be restricted out of global so the trolls can’t hang out. Been to WoW, done that. Now let me play my AoC!!

- Not being able to see high level/max level characters in the starting area is a little odd. I never realized how much I enjoy checking out high level characters in a new game, to see what my gear could look like one day. I also find it encouraging that people like the game and care about it enough to reach the upper levels and still log in.

- Lots and lots of LFG… from the same people looking for the same instances. I’m not sure if that’s a sign that there’s not enough of a population to put groups together at those levels, or if people just don’t pug much.

- No obvious RP yet. I’m on the unofficial RP server, Wiccana, which supposedly has a big RP community. I have yet to see any of it, but I found this website, which has info on RP events. I’m going to scope out some of the places that RPers tend to hang out.

- Casting combat is very much the generic mage type stuff in other MMOs. My necro has only one “fatality” (combat finishing move), which is hardly noticeable. The melee characters get dramatic things, like decapitations and blood splatters across their monitors. As a caster, I feel a little like an afterthought. My next character will be a DT, I think.

- I really like the quest presentation in AoC. You enter into a conversation with the NPC, and have choices of things to say. In the starting area, all the NPCs have voice acting accompanying the quest text.

My little necromancer just got finished with Tortage last night, at the ripe old level of 22, and is off to Khemi. I’m eager to see if AoC has improved in the world beyond Tortage.

My husband joked once that I should come up with a gaming CV, so when I meet other nerds I can share my qualifications. So when I saw Syp post his MMO History, I decided to do the same here!

Hmm… I should dig out my Geek Code for kicks. I wonder if I still have it?! I bet it’s changed a lot since my “hanging out in the basement of the engineering building” days.

Why not just potatoes? They’re delicious, nutritious and OMG, that one looks like Darth Vader!!

Originally this domain was bought for my daughter, a Douglas Adams fan who thought the above quote was funny and thusly, a good name for a website. I recently ninja’d it from her, stuck her with something far less cool (shhh!), and stole it for my own. Because I can.

After years of blogging about family stuff on shadow-earth.com and spending tons of time as a comment box terrorist on other people’s blogs, I decided that I wanted my name to be all linky too.

I really (probably) have nothing meaningful to say. All my best stuff goes into the comment boxes of the folks on the right, but meh… we’ll see how it goes.

PS. She got mad at me for not mentioning that she made the funny potato faces in the upper right hand corner. Armed with a camera, three potatoes, GIMP, and instructions to “Make Mom some potato art,” she produced those little guys.

If you’re looking for Tiel’s website, please note that it’s been moved to runningdownwind.com