Roleplaying Flags and How to Love Them

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To a roleplayer in any MMO, many people might find the character model they’re using a bit limiting. In SWTOR, we don’t really have this problem. We have the option of giving our characters cybernetics, various skin textures, tattoos, or even certain scarring. We can even adjust the weight of the character. We have the body type option in LotRO, also the option for minimal facial customization, but if we want our characters to have anything past that, we’re out of luck. The same goes for WoW in that we only have minimal customization options for our characters.

So what if the image of the character we have in our heads doesn’t match what our characters actually look like? What are we as roleplayers supposed to do then? And, for that matter, how are we supposed to let other roleplayers know we’re roleplaying at all? For some, walking through a major city is a good enough indicator, as is talking to various NPCs. For others, however, this might not be enough. This is where flagging yourself as a roleplayer can be incredibly handy.

Turbine: Supplying Helpful Tools for the Roleplaying Community

In LotRO, this is very easy to do. By default, the names and various sundry things that display over our heads appears in yellow or greenish-yellow text. If we type /rp on into the chat panel, however, the text over our head changes to white, indicating that we’re roleplayers. You can type /rp into the chat panel to see if you’re flagged or not if you aren’t sure whether or not you’ve set it.

Engeled demonstrating how nameplates look with "/rp off" (left) and "/rp on" (right).

Turbine also decided to be wonderful and give us a biography screen. In this screen, you can show off your parentage/children (providing you’ve been adopted by another player or have adopted one, yourself), and you even have a spot to detail your character’s personal history. While many roleplayers in LotRO use it for it’s intended purpose, others still tend to take advantage of the space and write out a detailed description of their character’s physical appearance. I have yet to figure out how I want to take advantage of the space, so, for right now, it’s left blank on both of my characters.

Warcraft, Addons, and You

However, while Turbine was wonderful and built these tools directly into the game for us, Blizzard has not. If we as roleplayers in Azeroth want a similar tool, we have to utilize addons. At first, I didn’t know addons like this existed, but I downloaded one, it opened up a whole new aspect of roleplaying for me. I fell in love with them, and if you’re a roleplayer in WoW, having an addon like this is kind of a godsend, especially if you’re on a server where non-RPers coexist with the rest of the roleplaying community. If you don’t have one already, I highly recommend that you download one and play with it.

If this is your first time looking into one of these addons, I’d recommend starting off with either MyRoleplay or FlagRSP2/FlagRSP Cataclysm, if only because these tend to be the most commonly used roleplaying addons in the Warcraft community. There are other addons you could use, as well, but as I have no experience with them, I’m going to keep myself from talking about them. When it comes to choosing an addon for these purposes, however, I can’t really recommend using one over all the others out there as I’ve found that it’s really a matter of personal preference. Most of the flag generating addons are able to “talk” to each other, so you should be able to read all the flags you come across regardless of the addon you choose. Take your time, investigate the various RP addons, and choose whichever one you like the best.

After you’ve made your choice, install them as you would any other addon you use in WoW. Then, the next time you boot up the game and get ready to have fun in Azeroth, you’ll be ready to roll and you can start filling things in! However, you don’t have to fill out all those blank areas right away. Personally, I like to take some time to make sure my description for the character is solid before I fill in anything. Therefore, the first thing I tend to do is fill in the character’s surname if the character has one (or given name as the case may be) and set my flags, and I’d recommend you do this, too. After all, you can put in a description at any given time, but letting people know if you’re in character or not is one of the first steps to initiating random RP.

Your Character’s Description

So you have your options on how to input your character’s physical description. The question now is how do you go about writing it?

You could do something as basic as “what you see is what you get”, implying that your character looks exactly as s/he is on the screen or you could go wild and crazy. Some even choose to put in their character’s backstory into their description, but I’d personally caution you against doing that. After all, your character doesn’t have their history written on their clothing (or do they?). Remember that no one would know your character’s entire life story just from looking at them. However, MyRoleplay does have a “Background” field that you can choose to put your character’s history into if you were so inclined. (I never do.) You can get away with this in the space Turbine provided for us, as well, but I would not recommend doing this outside of the designated areas unless you want to have other roleplayers look at your flag with some confusion.

Personally, my character descriptions tend to be a bit on the briefer side, a paragraph or two at most, and are limited to my character’s physical description only. Think about what others would see, smell, or hear when they come upon your character. If your character is one of the Forsaken, does his/her bones creak when they walk? Perhaps the character smells of the earth or like mold or your character wears various things in their hair that clack or jingle when they move. These are the things you’d definitely want to include, as descriptions like these are used to engage another RPer in your character prior to actually initiating conversation. In real life, a person’s opinion of you is set in their minds just from that first glance, so make it count!

A look at the MyRoleplay interface (which blends nicely into WoW's existing interface) and Adaret's description.

Now, are there things to avoid? Certainly. I already suggested not putting your character’s history into their description, so I won’t touch on that again. However, there are other things. For example, you can see that Adaret’s description above has some extraneous descriptors that I could take out and lose absolutely nothing. This is a milder example of purple prose, or very extravagant and flowery writing, and isn’t exactly something a lot of people would want to try to slog through. Nor, for that matter, is thesaurus abuse. Examples of this would be writing “orbs” in place of eyes or something like “puce” in place of “green”. You don’t want to have to make someone break out a dictionary just to be able to understand what you’re trying to say. To see an example of this all put together, please take a look at this wonderful example crafted by one of my friends on Thorium Brotherhood of her character, Dariahn (please note that this is a parody and is no way reflective of Dariahn’s actual flag).

Another common thing I see people doing when it comes to their flags is saying how the other person reading your flag is supposed to feel when they look at your character. This is godmodding (which I will touch upon in another post) and is generally frowned upon. No one likes being told how their character is supposed to act or how they will react to certain things. Without going into a godmodding rant, however, I will simply leave you with this: Do not do it.

Keep in mind, however, that all of this is just a suggestion. I’m not saying that you absolutely need to have an addon to roleplay, that you have to flag yourself as a roleplayer, or that you need to write your description a certain way. However, these tools do make finding other roleplayers infinitely easier, and if you’re stuck for inspiration when it comes to writing your own description, you can hunt down other examples very easily just running around one of the major RP servers out there and seeing what other players have come up with. Ultimately, though, your character’s description is entirely up to you, so remember to have fun with it.

Shoe-Wearing Hobbits

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Every so often, I like taking a look at the search terms that bring people to Pen and Shield. Most of them tend to be very logical leaps. Due to the blog title, for example, many of the lovely people using Google tend to make their way here due to searching for “pen” and “shield” and other variations thereupon. To those of you who are interested in those things, I apologize as I’m pretty sure this blog is not what you were trying to find. However, there was one quite recently that brought someone to this blog that I thought was kind of interesting. The question was as follows:

Why do LotRO hobbits have shoes?

Now, this was a question I actually asked, myself, when I first started playing my hobbit minstrel and didn’t quite understand how the cosmetic system worked. The hobbits we’re all familiar with, after all, don’t seem to wear shoes. In fact, most hobbits don’t. Tolkien himself says a hobbit’s foot possesses a tough leathery sole, thereby eliminating the need to wear shoes in their everyday lives. For that reason, the majority of the hobbits we see as NPCs in the Shire in LotRO do not wear any sort of footwear whatsoever. However, Tolkien also says that they “seldom” wear shoes, which indicates that some hobbits must wear them.

Anthyllis decides to try wearing boots for herself.

So who are these interesting hobbits? Why wear shoes?

The thing is that shoes, as in any MMO, are pieces of gear. You need that gear for the stats it will give you and you’ll be hurting yourself pretty badly if you don’t have a piece equipped. Fortunately, LotRO has provided us with a cosmetic gear system that allows players to choose what displays on their character and what doesn’t. You get all the stats from the piece, but you don’t have to look like you’re wearing it, which is absolutely wonderful. If you don’t want your hobbit to be wearing shoes all the time, all you have to do is click the appropriate button next to your shoes, and no more shoes visible for your hobbit! (Admittedly, at first, I couldn’t quite understand why this option wasn’t toggled off by default for all hobbits, but that’s neither here nor there.) Some pieces of cosmetic gear (many of the dresses, for example) can be equipped cosmetically and already have the shoes automatically toggled off for your hobbits, so if your hobbit will be wandering about in some sort of finery, you might not have to do any work at all!

Perhaps your character’s nationality might have something to do with whether or not they wear shoes. After all, at character creation, you’re faced with three hobbit nationalities: the Fallowhides, the Stoors, and the Harfoots (Harfeet?). Out of these three nationalities, only one has been known to wear any sort of footwear. Historically, the Stoors wore boots, but they only wore them when the environment called for it. So, if you wanted your hobbit to be a boot-wearing hobbit, a Stoor might be the way to go.

There are, of course, some occasions where shoes might be considered appropriate. If you’re a heavily armored hobbit, maybe you want to make sure everything’s protected, including your wonderful feet. The best solution then would clearly be appropriately matching footwear. If you’re wandering about in the cold, perhaps up in the Misty Mountains, and you don’t want your toes to freeze off, shoes are wonderful things to invest in. Anthyllis’ cold weather “armor” set sports a pair, and she doesn’t particularly care who criticizes her for it.

Writing all this, however, has made me curious. I’m sure I have some people who read this blog who play hobbits in LotRO. Even if you don’t, I’m curious anyway. Is your hobbit a shoe-wearing hobbit? If you don’t play, would your hobbit wear shoes or go without? What might prompt them to wear shoes at all?

The Melee Experiment

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This year is the fifth anniversary of Lord of the Rings Online! Hooray! Admittedly, I’ve only been playing for a year, but it’s still exciting! None of my other MMOs celebrate their birthdays quite like LotRO does, complete with beer battles, fireworks at night (with a show you can actually participate in), shiny new cosmetic gear that you may or may not be interested in, and several other surprises you might not expect. (For example, the other night, I discovered a horse in an envelope while gathering lost festival invitations around Bree.) And, while I don’t know if this is common during the anniversary festivals or not since this is still my first year playing, Turbine has even offered us double the experience points beginning on April 24th and going into the 30th, although I’m unsure if it extends until the new end of the festival (May 9th) as the festivities have been extended. Regardless, this makes it perfect if you have a character that’s been a bit more difficult to level than others. You can level up, go on all the festival quests, and even earn some tokens as you do which you can exchange for gift boxes and even marks which you can put towards pretty much anything.

This being me, however, I was ignoring the marks and the gift boxes and all the other fun things. I instead looked at the double experience bonus and saw it as an opportunity to create a new alt and to see how far I could take her while the bonus was in place. With this in mind, I decided to revisit my original LotRO character (who has gone under multiple class changes while I attempted to figure out who she was): Engeled of Rohan. After looking over every single class that Men could be, I eventually decided I wanted to try something she could be that no other race could. I decided she would be a captain.

I did waffle over the choice quite a bit, though, since, as I’ve stated before, I have issues with melee combat. To me, it isn’t all that fun. However, I was in love with the look of the Captain class. If you were to spend enough time in Bree, you see a handful of them running around at any given time, and all the ones I’ve seen have looked absolutely amazing. Sometimes certain things just look so amazing that you kind of want to have one, regardless of how you feel about the type of class in general. Then again, maybe that’s just me. In any case, I realized this would make an interesting experiment. Was I still completely out of love with melee or could I put that aside for a class I loved? (Well, providing I fell in love with the class at all.)

Engeled pondering her next move.

Once I settled on a design I liked (close enough to her original design where I would feel comfortable), I dove in, and it wasn’t until I was running around Archet after it’s destruction, happily slaughtering a giant spider that a NPC had asked me to kill around level 9 or so at the time that I realized something.

I was still having fun.

In a moment where Engeled was about to die, I quickly switched targets to kill something else just to trigger a defeat response so I could heal her just a bit and land the last few blows on the signature-portrait spider, I realized it was just as challenging as ranged DPS was to me. Sure, it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t like the fact that things could wail on me the second I started wailing on it, but somehow, none of that mattered. Besides which, Engeled could heal! If she lasted long enough and I was brave enough to venture into dungeons, I could heal them! (Paladin healing is still very much a love of mine and I’m always eager to see if I can find something else close to it.)

So far, Engeled has reached Level 16 and has only just gotten through the prologue of the epic storyline. And I’m still having fun. I hear that captains really start getting amazing around level 30 or so, and, as of right now, I’m planning on sticking it out until then, at least. I really haven’t had this much fun with a class in a long time.

Leveling and Legacies

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I used to think that the only people who powered through content in MMOs were the truly obsessed, the addicted, or only existed on sitcoms where geek culture takes some sort of prominence. I’m definitely not one of those people. I am, however, the kind of person who typically likes to savor their content. I’d rather take my time and see what there is to see. As a roleplayer who doesn’t normally raid, there really isn’t much for me to do in terms of “endgame content”, anyhow. What’s the point in rushing, anyway? The majority of the people who do rush to level cap often tend to sit in general chat wherever they are and complain about the lack of endgame content. I certainly never wanted to be one of those people, and I was perfectly happy taking my time killing things and slowly progressing through the content.

Then Bioware had to go and screw all that up by unleashing patch 1.2 in Star Wars: The Old Republic last Thursday.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited for the patch. I was. What was there to hate about racial unlocks, family trees, and a whole slew of other new things that came along with it? (Not to mention the stealth inclusion of the rakghoul plague spreading to Tatooine, but I digress.) The new patch meant that something I’ve wanted since the game began was almost within my reach: a twi’lek bounty hunter. I really don’t know what it is about the race that I love, but I love everything about them, and when the game had first begun and we had limited information as to what twi’leks could be, I was a little disappointed that they couldn’t be bounty hunters. This disappointment grew exponentially upon game launch when it turned out there were twi’lek bounty hunter trainers. I was very sad. With the new patch, however, as soon as I got a twi’lek to level 50, I could finally have my wish. It really didn’t take long for this to set in for me.

Out of the two twi’lek characters I had, the closest to level cap by the time the patch rolled around was Bel’neven, my Sith Sorcerer, who was level 40 at the time. Keeping this in mind, there was really only one thing to do: go on a leveling binge. I had the day off, after all! So, after going out to stock up a bit on necessary supplies, I went a little crazy. That first day, I was fortunate enough to get Bel’neven to level 45 and get her off of Belsavis. I’ve been working on her ever since, and then, late last night, I finally achieved the dream:

After a brief conversation with Khem Val, Bel'neven finally hits level 50.

Needless to say, I was excited and had to fail about it over twitter. (I even got an early congratulations from the official SWTOR twitter account! I’m still floored about that.) Was it worth it? I can honestly say that, yes, I feel like it was. By the time I hit Corellia, the Sith Inquisitor storyline was really picking up, and I was excited to see where it would go. I won’t go into the specifics here, if only because that’s another post unto itself. I will say, though, that if there’s one thing Bioware really knows how to do, it’s create a good story and keep you invested in it. You may switch to other alts, but you still remember most of what’s going on. You’re still invested in the arc, your character, and your character’s companions. So, yeah, definitely worth it. Now I can finally explore the bits of the galaxy that were previously unknown to me, and PvP my little heart out with other people at my level.

Plus, you know, there’s that wonderful added bonus of finally being able to start my twi’lek alt army, starting with the twi’lek bounty hunter I’ve yearned for. Be afraid, citizens of Lord Adraas. Be very afraid. ;)

Cosmetically Equipped: Concerning Hobbits

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One of the things I love about Lord of the Rings Online is the cosmetic gear system. Let’s face it, guys. In any MMO, you pick up gear as you go along in the world and, unfortunately, some bits look better than others. However, it’s all the same. In the end, we’re usually stuck wearing gear that makes us look like clowns. Fortunately, LotRO gives us a way to combat the clown gear by giving us access to dyes, but then we have a new problem. Some parts of whatever we might choose to fall in love with just do not take dye, and if they do, they can sometimes look worse than before if you like using a specific dye color with your character and said dye color clashes with the bits that can’t be dyed. For these troubling moments, I am eternally grateful that we can have another set of gear overlayed on top of our questing gear while still getting the stats from it.

For the curious, yes, dear readers, you are now witnessing my secret love: cosmetic gear.  It’s no secret that I like my characters to look good. Even if I wasn’t a roleplayer, I’d still happily use a system like this. I feel like every character has an outfit for anything they do, even if it’s just hanging around with guild/kinmates. You don’t have to look like a hodgepodge of different armor styles all the time, after all. There’s a reason why addons like Outfitter, back in the earlier days of WoW, were so popular, as these allowed us to easily switch between our questing/PvP gear and that pretty dress we got during the last holiday or the matching armor set that was gathering dust in our bank. I jumped for joy when WoW came out with transmogging, but I still think it pales in comparison to LotRO’s cosmetic system.

I’m still new to the ways of cosmetic gearing, as the majority of my outfits tend to be simple things. I’m also still somewhat in the “EVERYTHING I PUT ON MUST MATCH” phase. Once I began to figure out how the cosmetic gear system worked and I had options apart from the cosmetics that came with the Rise of Isengard expansion, I realized I needed something for Anthyllis to wear when she returned to the safer areas and she wasn’t out and about questing. She needed what I decided to call a Hobbit About Town look, something she could live in. After messing around a bit, taking into account what Tolkien himself said hobbits favored for colors, and going through the mish-mash of a wardrobe that I had, I finally came up with something I loved.

Admittedly, yes, it’s a very simple cosmetic outfit as I didn’t have to worry about footgear (what self-respecting hobbit would wear shoes, I ask you?) or gloves. Despite that, I cannot think of a better look for her. Anthyllis is very attached to this hat, and it’s part of every single outfit I piece together for her whether you can see it or not (the exception to this being her questing set as the scrolls from the Map-Maker’s Travelling Pack clip through the brim). I even got a compliment on it the other night when I was loitering around Oatbarton! The pieces, in case you’re wondering, are as follows:

Head: Plumed Hat, dyed Umber (Quest Reward: Into the Shadow / Medicine of the Elves)
 Chest: Robe of Leisure, dyed Ranger Green (LotRO store)

In this entire process, though, I realized something very important: I need to clean out the wardrobe. There’s so much stuff in there and I think I just started throwing things in there without knowing if I really wanted them in there or not…

A Hobbit’s Tale

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Today, it occurred to me that I don’t talk about LotRO as much as I probably should. It may seem like a strange realization to come to, but, after all, I hold just as much love for Tolkien’s Middle Earth as I do Azeroth or the galaxy at large. In fact, I probably hold more love in my heart for Middle Earth than I do any other fantasy world currently in existence simply because I grew up with the stories. I remember stumbling upon my uncle’s boxed set of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and initially thinking they looked interesting. Because of my interest, my uncle would tell me what the books were about, and we’d write stories about what happened after the War of the Ring was ended up in his loft. Once I could actually read, I confiscated the books and read them in the early hours of the morning while I waited for everybody else to get up (he promptly bought me my own boxed set of the books, including the Hobbit, as a Christmas present). When the films came out, I naturally dragged my uncle along with me to go and see them, because, really, I couldn’t imagine anybody else going with me. He even bought me the extended edition DVD sets with their decorative boxes and little statues. To this day, I proudly display the Argonath bookends (though one of them sadly lost its hand) and the Minas Tirith box on my dresser.

Given all that, I’m sure you guys can imagine that when I discovered there was an MMO based on the books that held so many memories for me, I squeed like the dork I was, downloaded it, and played the hell out of it, though altoholism sunk it’s teeth into me very early on and I had a character list full of several characters that I’ve never really touched. They’ve since been deleted. I abandon the game every so often, but, in the end, I always come back to it, and I know that Middle Earth will always be there waiting for me.

It’s strange to think of how things would have been different if LotRO was the game that sunk its claws into me ages before Azeroth ever did. Pen and Shield might not even exist! I’d still be blogging, but the blog might have been titled something different, something hobbity (for I’m a hobbit at heart), and I’d be blogging under the name Anthyllis Greyburrow, the name of my main, a hobbit minstrel on the Landroval server. Speaking of, it occurs to me that I have yet to show off a picture of my girl, so… Meet Anthyllis!

Anthyllis says, "Hello, everybody!"

Anthyllis is, naturally, a hobbit of the Shire, who was fascinated by the stories of Bilbo’s adventures. Curious by nature, Anthyllis wanted to see everything Bilbo had seen, although the rest of the Greyburrows didn’t approve. She, however, was not to be deterred and set forth to Bree. Unfortunately, she didn’t exactly make it there. She got sidetracked by being attacked by brigands, seeing a Black Rider (scary stuff), and then getting sucked into the fate of Middle Earth while more hobbits were off bringing a ring to the elves and beyond. At that point, she was a bit too curious about the rest of the world to turn back. Besides which, all of this might make a good story to tell someday!

Unfortunately, LotRO is one of those “occasional” games for me, so poor Anthyllis only seems to get love from me every so often. It also doesn’t help that the game gets a bit lonely for me sometimes. Anthyllis is kinless and there isn’t random green text to keep me company as I go out and quest in the world. It’s hard finding a guild or group of people who are okay with you disappearing for several days at a time as you try to balance your free time between three different games and they won’t remove you due to inactivity. In spite of all that, though, I’ve been rather dedicated to LotRO over the past few days, putting in several hours worth of time to finally get Anthyllis to level 30 and hit the end of Book 2 of Volume One of the epic storyline. I’m very excited to keep going, though I’m getting little tired of fighting corrupted trees that decide to uproot themselves and attack me. I swear, they’re everywhere…

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

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Now, normally, you guys know I don’t do this sort of thing. I tend to leave all MMO-related news for the various MMO news sites. After all, I’ve always felt that they could do better than I could when it came to reporting said news to the world at large. However, today, Blizzard has released some interesting new information about Mists of Pandaria. The news that interested me the most, at least at first, was how the female pandaren were going to look. After the mess that turned into the female worgen model, I really was worried about how our lady pandas were going to look. And then today, when I went to check out Blizzard’s blog, I was rewarded with this:

Image © Blizzard Entertainment

LOOK AT HER. No, really, just look at her. She looks so happy and properly curvy and not a stick! I was hopeful that the model would be a bit rounder, myself, but considering the lack of bulkier women in this game, I’m happy with it as it stands. Currently, there are only three races that boast a thicker-looking female model: dwarves, orcs, and tauren. Everyone else seems to be more along the lines of a stick-figure model that you’d tend to see in everyday fashion magazines. To add another race to that tiny, tiny list makes me so ridiculously happy. You guys honestly have no idea. I hear that you can choose to be a red panda, as well, and, if you do, you get a tail. While there are screenshots of a female red panda floating around the internet, there are no shots of this mysterious tail, so I don’t know how accurate that is in the long run.

But there’s more! Today was not just about showing us all female pandas! Oh, no, there was much more to today than that. Not only is the Mists of Pandaria website updated with a whole bunch of new information and new screenshots, but today, the NDA on the press tour was finally lifted! You can read the longer version of what everybody discovered at the press tour over at MMO-Champion or check out WoW Insider’s Mists of Pandaria tag, but for those of you who only have a short amount of time, I can tell you that it looks like we have fun things coming, including an additional character slot and… Farmville, if that’s your thing. Don’t believe me? Check it out!

  • The final patch of Mists of Pandaria will be the Siege of Orgrimmar! Both factions lay siege to the city to bring Garrosh down and end his reign of Warchief.
  • The new LFR loot system will allow everyone to roll individually. The highest few rolls will win an item from the boss. Upon winning a roll, if the boss has an item that you can use, you will win it. If not, you will get some amount of gold. It will only be in LFR to begin with, but can be added to other parts of the game later.
  • An 11th character slot has been added.
  • AoE Looting has been added.
  • There will not be an item squish in Mist of Pandaria.
  • No new race models are ready to be added yet.
  • There will be nine level 90 heroics for players as well as three raids with 14 raid bosses and three difficulties. There will be an additional two world bosses.
  • Scenarios will take place at level 90, in an instance, and reward reputation and Valor points. They don’t need a healer, tank, and DPS, just DPS is fine. Each will take 10 to 30 minutes to complete and five or more will be available for launch.
  • In Challenge Modes, the vast majority of players will most likely earn a bronze medal even if they are a relatively unskilled player. After a player earns all the medals at the Bronze level, they will be rewarded with an achievement and title. Completing all of the Silver medals will earn a set of spectacular gear for transmogrification, and completing all of the gold will earn a unique epic flying mount. Challenge modes will be available for the six new dungeons at launch.
  • Cloud Serpents are the Pandaren’s mount of choice. You can raise your own by doing 20 days of daily quests.
  • The Tillers faction will let you run your own farm! The farmer’s market will provide daily quest to improve your farm every day, you will be able to clear plots of land and plant things like cooking ingredients, herbalism nodes, gifts for NPCs to build your reputation… etc.
  • Warlocks got the most class changes in MoP, along with new pets.
  • There will be more mounts and less color swaps for different rewards.
  • They are adding armor to creatures to give them varied appearances, something other than just simple color changes.
  • There are now seven zones, up from five. This was done to add more content to the game and give players a less linear progression path so that leveling for a second or third time isn’t the exact same.
  • There will be one new arena and two new battlegrounds at launch.
  • PvP pet battles are going to be fun and causal, only tracking the number of wins and not the number of losses. When fighting another player, you cannot see the other players name or communicate with them.
  • Currently, every race except Goblin and Worgen can learn the ways of the monk.
  • The pre-Mists of Pandaria Patch will be roughly two weeks before launch and bring simple rewards. It might involve a scenario with Theramore and the Alliance vs Horde theme. Chen Stormstout might also come to the local cities and get players excited about what is coming.

From the look of things, it seems like Blizzard’s trying to bring us back to the days of Vanilla WoW. There’s no Big Bad to fight, which pleases me. The idea of fighting Deathwing seemed much more impressive than the overall story really was. With MoP, there’s just pure conflict between the Alliance and the Horde, and I love the idea of it.

So am I looking forward to the new expansion? Well, if everything I’m reading about it holds true, then yes. Yes, I am. At the very least, I’ll be rolling a wonderful lady pandaren and she will be bouncy and adorable. :D

Not So Scary After All

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I’ll be the first to say that new things can, and often do, terrify me. Change is something that I honestly find scary, even though I know I shouldn’t. After all, change can be good. Unfortunately, if you were to thrust me into something that I knew absolutely nothing about whatsoever, I’d panic. I’ll admit that right now. I’m a panicker. It’s what I do.

And yet, somehow, when a guildmate of mine and I had been talking about warzones (SWTOR’s version of battlegrounds), I thought diving into one without a friend was a good plan. Now, prior to the other night, I had never even touched warzones. Operations and flashpoints are also things I’ve never really touched, but, you know, that’s something for another time. Warzones, however, are infinitely more terrifying. Now, you have to understand that on the Imperial side, I’m a Sith Inquisitor and a healer, besides. My primary goal is healing people and making sure the people who are qualified to take out the opposing team can actually do it. Unfortunately, being a healer in a battleground is the equivalent of being a giant target. See, once the opposing team knows you’re the healer, you might as well have one of those giant flashing neon arrows over your head. They will come after you, and you may wind up a smear on the floor if you can’t heal yourself quickly enough.

Despite the fact that absolutely terrified me, despite not knowing what the hell I was doing, I thought it was a wonderful idea to queue up for a warzone. It was only when the queue popped that I started to panic. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, what warzone I was going to be thrust into, or even what the goal of said warzone was. Despite this, I clicked the button to enter the warzone anyway, and was faced with a loading screen I did not recognize at all. Now, I know I could have asked what we were supposed to do once we all came into the warzone (that I later learned was the Voidstar), but I decided against it. Instead, I plunged in, taking minimal instruction via BG chat. Apparently, Voidstar’s two rounds: one where you attack and another where you defend, all in the span of a few minutes. All in all, I think things went pretty well, since both sides never let the other near the datacore, and there were victories all around.

Emboldened, I plunged in again. At least if I got Voidstar again, I’d know what I was doing! It was not to be, however, as I found myself in Alderaan. This time, someone asked if we had any healers in the group, and I was brave enough to pipe up and tell them that I was. Someone was kind enough to bubble me, and the battleground began. I had the most fun in Alderaan, I think, and I found it to be a much friendlier experience than the Voidstar had been. As the Empire ran out to claim the center turret, I followed, and there I remained throughout the battleground, keeping everybody alive as much as I realistically could. Some were higher in level than I was, others were lower, but, to my surprise, I helped make some of the people around me unbeatable, and, under my watch, most of us were. In Alderaan, I didn’t die nearly as often as I had in the Voidstar, and, in the end, several members of our little band even voted me an MVP!

I’m not certain what an MVP vote does once the warzone is over, mind, but the fact that people had voted for me at all made me all kinds of happy, and gave me the confidence to dive in again. This time, I got Huttball. I was most certainly not a fan of Huttball. I died many times there, mostly due to not knowing what the hell I was doing, but I tried to heal whoever was carrying the ball as quickly as I could. Sure, I died several times doing it, but, you know, that happens.

In the end, when all was said and done and I returned to the Imperial fleet, I realized I was actually enjoying myself. Sure, I had no idea what I was doing and I had died multiple times, but I was having fun nonetheless! And I was earning commendations I could spend on pretty moddable gear once I hit level 40 so I could finally wear something that actually matched. Long story short, I tried something that honestly scared me, and it turned out that I had fun doing it. I encourage everybody to give something like that a try because it really isn’t as scary as you might think it is. You might even have fun.

The Meme of Sixes

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Apparently, there is a meme of sixes going around. A good number of the Warcraft blogging tweeps I follow have apparently been tagged to participate. The rules are simple: you go into your image folder, go to the sixth subfolder, and choose the sixth image in that folder, then tag six other to do the same. Some of us decided to take this a step further and make the whole thing a bit more involved. Even though I hadn’t been tagged to do it, I was incredibly tempted to go and do it anyway. To be honest, I didn’t even think anybody would tag me to do it. Pen and Shield is still in it’s own obscure corner of the internet, after all, and I get maybe a handful of readers here, if that. So I suppose you guys can imagine my surprise when Lilpeanut of Heal Over Time tagged me to do the meme I’d been thinking about doing. It’s always nice to find out more people than I think read this or, at the very least, know about it.

So, since Pen and Shield covers multiple games now, I decided to personally take things a step further. Not only are we going into my Warcraft screenshots folder, but also my SWTOR and LotRO screenshot folders. I guess I like madness? I don’t know. Continue reading →

There’s No Place Like Home…

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In all of the virtual worlds I’ve played in, one thing seems to remain constant. We, as players, want a piece of that virtual world for our own. If you think about it, it makes sense. After all, our characters live within this world. They have to come from somewhere or have somewhere to go when they aren’t out adventuring. However, World of Warcraft seems to be the only MMO I play that doesn’t have some sort of “player housing”. One could argue that The Old Republic doesn’t have one, either, but that’s only if they don’t count the starship every class receives at around level 16 or so. Yes, every player of the same class gets the same ship. There’s no upkeep costs, really, save for fuel costs to get to various planets, but the ship still feels like ours. World of Warcraft, however, has nothing like this. Players (particularly the roleplaying crowd) will tend to take over various unoccupied homes or buildings and unofficially claim them for their own while others might say their character lives out of a room they rent in one of the various inns. There’s no true player housing, per se, despite the various cries for it from the roleplaying player base.

Personally, I don’t know that we’d ever see it in World of Warcraft, despite the leaps Blizzard’s made in their phasing technology. While they could use something similar to the system that Lord of the Rings Online has (and I know there are some who argue that they should), if you take a closer look at LotRO’s system, implementing something that mimics LotRO’s really isn’t practical in WoW. Now, I’ll be one of the first to admit that I love how LotRO’s housing system is set up. However, the scale of it is a bit huge and I’m not certain that Blizzard could implement the same exact model that Turbine used for LotRO, unless they were to make the style of the homes faction-specific and not racial-specific.

Confused? Well, I’ll explain.

LotRO is, of course, under a slightly different model than WoW. We don’t have factions, per se, save for “good” and “evil”. So, on that wonderful day when Turbine chose to give LotRO players player housing, they only had one “faction” to work with (if you can even call it that, really) and only four races to play with. As a result, there are four distinct homesteads you can move into, each based on one of the four playable races of Middle Earth (Men, Dwarves, Elves, and Hobbits). Within each homestead are instanced neighborhoods with a set number of homes in each, including a number of homes for your kinship (or guild) to occupy, providing you meet the requirements and have the gold for it. The best part, though, is that there’s never a shortage of homes. As each neighborhood fills up, new ones are automatically generated by the system. If a home you really want to move into is occupied, hang around by the housing broker. A new neighborhood might appear the next time you log in, and, if you’re quick, you can claim the house you really want.

Honestly, the hardest part is trying to determine where you want to live. You do have choices, and those are wonderful, but it’s the choices themselves that make the whole process much more complicated than it really has to be. Are you a human who loves elven architecture enough to live there or do you just want a tiny little farmhouse out in Bree-land? Will your hobbit stay in the Shire or branch out to live in the land of the dwarves? Or maybe you and your friends all want to live in the same homestead and are just trying to see which you all like best. Even if you aren’t committed to any one homestead, I do recommend visiting each and seeing what appeals to you. The best part is that other players will usually allow random visitors into their home (I do), and you can go in to see what they’ve done with it. Not only will you get decorating ideas for when it comes time to buy your own, but it gives you an idea of what you can do with the space. Homes in the elven homesteads, for example, tend to have notoriously high ceilings and it may be difficult to figure out how best to arrange things on the wall. Taking a look at how other players decorated their elven-style homes gave me ideas for mine should I ever decide to pack up and move into one.

As for me, well, I’m a hobbit at heart. Whether I had a character of another race or not, I’d probably still get a little hobbit house. I can’t afford a deluxe house, sadly. I’m still saving up. I long for the day when I have three rooms and I can turn one of them into a proper library (Anthyllis, my hobbit minstrel, loves her stories and maps, you see). For now, though, I suspect I’ll have to content myself with a standard home. If you’re on the Landroval server, feel free to come and visit the Greyburrow home in the Shire Homesteads. She resides in the Marebourn neighborhood at 2 Wending Way. If she’s at home, she’ll make you some tea. If she’s not, feel free to look through her books. The main room’s a bit covered by them. Just please put them back where you found them.

The main room in Anthyllis' home. Go ahead and curl up by the fire with a good book!

So was this post an excuse to go on about something I love in LotRO? Probably. To be fair, I would like to see actual player housing in World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, however, I can’t see Blizzard implementing it on the above scale. The main problem, of course, being that WoW is split into factions and they have multiple races in each. To implement something like this would probably be incredibly time-consuming, not to mention the headache of trying to figure out where to put the homesteads and how much that would cost for upkeep and whatnot. I can see some players complaining about gold sinks if they do that, too.

To make things simpler on the dev team, I could see Blizzard making player homes faction-specific as opposed to racially specific. The problem with that, though, is that the two iconic races for each faction (in this case, it really seems to be humans and orcs) have very distinct looks, which not everybody would be that into. Someone who plays a blood elf, for example, might not be all right with their character moving into an incredibly primitive-looking house. And then there’s the whole matter of interior decorating. Would they come pre-furnished or would Blizzard implement something like LotRO and let the homeowner decorate it? If it’s the latter, how crazy should Blizzard go trying to come up with unique furniture ideas?

Eventually, I’m sure it could be done, but I’m not sure Blizzard could do it at this very moment. Look at how long it took them to give us something remotely close to the cosmetic system some of us have been wanting….