Category Archives: World of Warcraft

Getting Back in the Groove

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So quite a few of you, dear readers, follow me on Twitter. As such, most of you have been subjected to my ongoing tweets about messing around with Alliance-side RP. See, the majority of the people I know on my home server of Thorium Brotherhood have been taking a bit of a break due to various reasons. While I hope that things pick up come Mists of Pandaria next month, I did miss RPing with people, and with my druid almost at 85 and my other characters on standby until Mists drops, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try something new. After all, none of my Alliance characters have ever lasted very long. When I mentioned this on Twitter, Bricu of WTT: [RP] naturally suggested Feathermoon. I do follow a good number of Feathermoon people on twitter, and they all seemed ridiculously awesome. I figured that if I was going to try this anywhere, it should be on a server that I knew had awesome people. I was even told there was RP happening Tuesday night!

I had a bit of personal drama regarding what character I was going to roll (the race remained consistent, but the class changed several times), and, unfortunately, twitter got the brunt of it. (I do apologize for that, guys.) Ultimately, I went back to a dwarf priest, one I spent all of Tuesday leveling like mad so she could at least look decent for when she made her appearance. Finally, six p.m. server time rolled around, and I made my way to the Pig and Whistle in Old Town of Stormwind. I was all excited on the way there, and a little bit nervous, but it wasn’t until I got to the door of the inn that I realized something.

I was completely and utterly terrified.

I could see Tarquin and Threnn and even Aelflaed (whose blog, Too Many Annas, I also follow) already inside, and these are people I’ve spent at least two years reading about through various blog posts. And then I saw Bricu himself walk in, and I panicked. I couldn’t even get my little dwarf through the door! Yeah, suffice to say that I was incredibly starstruck already.

Eventually, I decided I just had to get in there, similar to ripping off a bandaid, so I just ran inside and hid upstairs for a few minutes before sneaking downstairs and hiding at the table under one of the staircases. Bricu, however, saw me, and he was nice enough to provide me with a way into the conversation. Everyone was wonderful, and even though I may have botched the dwarf accent horribly, I really did have a lot of fun. I didn’t say much, no, and I spent a good chunk of the time thinking it would probably be easier if the character was a hunter or some other class (and I did have to admit that a priest drinking seemed a little odd to me), but I still had a great time. So much fun, in fact, that I’ll probably be back next week, if the Feathermoon crew will have me.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

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Today, ladies and gentlemen of the internet, I would like to tell you a story. This happened after I had rolled a little dwarf hunter on the Feathermoon server in World of Warcraft. Why I rolled this dwarf is a story for another time, unfortunately. What is important to today’s story, however, is that Feathermoon is a roleplaying server.

Like many (if not all) of the roleplaying servers out there, Feathermoon has it’s share of people who have rolled on the server, but have no desire whatsoever to roleplay. I could see the majority of them in trade chat while I ran my little dwarf around Ironforge, loading things up onto the Auction House and training some new abilities. And, as is bound to happen, many of the people going on in trade chat had characters with names that violated the naming policy (as well as the roleplaying policies that Blizzard has in place specifically for roleplaying servers, but that’s neither here nor there). However, in the course of my running around and trying to ignore trade chat, someone spoke up with something that wasn’t the usual trade chat fare.

“Oh my God. There are people RPing in the Blue Recluse!”

This was, of course, inevitably followed by comments along the lines of “lol, people RP here?” and other such things, along with some questions as to where the Blue Recluse actually was. People were very polite and even gave those asking directions the exact location of the Blue Recluse in the Mage Quarter of Stormwind. But then the person who had made the initial observation about the roleplayers said something that promptly startled me and nearly made my jaw hit the floor:

“Please don’t troll them, guys. They’re nice.”

Now, you guys have to understand that I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with non-roleplayers who roll a character on an RP server. After all, I’ve convinced a friend who doesn’t roleplay to come join me on a roleplaying server before. However, when it comes to those who do not roleplay, I just have one main rule: respect me and I’ll respect you. Yes, this means do not troll the RPers, and not just because it will “mess up a little storyline”. You chose to roll a character on a roleplaying server. That means that many of us are there for the roleplaying. Believe me, we would all really appreciate it if you did not troll us.

So when this person who was very much a non-RPer begged those in trade chat not to troll the roleplayers, well, it warmed my little heart. I’m not just saying, either. Their name might not have been the sort of name one might expect to see on a roleplaying server, no, but that one individual understood the concept of respecting the environment in which you rolled your character. They did not troll. They simply observered, and then asked other people to be respectful of the roleplayers. Needless to say, this made my night, and it pleased me so much that I had to share it with everyone else.

I wish I could remember the name of this individual and I wish I had thought to send him a whisper thanking him for being respectful, but I am ashamed to admit that it didn’t occur to me until after I had logged off for the night. Instead, I say to all you respectful non-roleplayers out there? Thank you all so much. It really means a lot to me, especially after seeing how hard people can troll the roleplayers of Azeroth.

Pandamonium: Shadow Priest Edition

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Everyone, meet Thyanel’s beta panda shadow priest, Hahani! Say hello, Hahani!

Unfortunately, despite her happy-looking face, Hahani is incredibly disappointed with me.

Why?

Well, thanks to a comment left on my previous post regarding the Mists of Pandaria beta, I realized I had been incredibly remiss in my shadow priestly duties. Pictures of the adorable pandas are all well and good, but how do the priests look in Shadowform? As a shadow priest, you spend the majority of your time in Shadowform. It’s not enough to like how you look outside of it; you have to like what you see in all your shadowy glory, too!

So, Marc? This is for you.

 

Panda-monium

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Just when I was ready to abandon all hope of ever laying my eyes upon the beta of Mists of Pandaria (as I couldn’t afford the year-long pass when it was offered to us), Raptr gave away beta keys a few days ago! Imagine my excitement when I realized that I not only qualified for a key according to their setup, but I was able to actually snatch one up almost immediately after it was offered and get into the awesomeness that was the beta. It felt like it took forever to download, but soon, I was there!

Clearly, the thing that was the most important to me was checking out the Pandaren starting zone, so it made sense for me to start there first. After waffling over class choices for several hours, I chose to create a little pandaren priest. Shadow priests are my thing, after all, and with Adaret’s story officially at a close, I’ve been giving some serious thought towards race-changing her into something else. Why not a pandaren? However, I had to make sure I liked them. They were cute and their women were appropriately curvy (which I did like), but could I stand to play one for an extended length of time? I figured this would be a very good test of that.

There were a few things I noticed immediately once my beta!priest was rolled and I was peering around at everything and everyone. First off, everyone and their mother, it seemed, was determined to play a pandaren monk (not that I blame them, as both will be new for all come MoP release day), and I couldn’t help but feel a little out of place as a little pandaren priest with her tiny little staff and adorable Chinese-inspired robes. Secondly, the zone itself is incredibly detailed and gorgeous, as are the models. At one point, I paused so I could zoom in on my panda’s face, and I could clearly see the detail they put into the fur. It looks gorgeous.

The adorable little pandaren priest I wound up rolling my first day in the beta. Lookit that cute little face!

Of course, as we all know, all pandaren begin life factionless. You get the option to join the Alliance or the Horde around level 12. However, before you can join your faction of choice, you must train! Your first ten or so levels are spent improving your skills and doing various important tasks around your home before you learn that things are not all happy and wonderful on the back of the giant turtle that you and the rest of the pandaren live on. Once you get to this point, the events that unfold afterwards shape the choices you make to select your faction. No spoilers, for those who are avoiding them, but let’s just say bits of the plot made me sad.

What I can tell you, however, is this: the entire leveling process, at least where you begin as a pandaren, is pretty streamlined. Strangely, however, there was a complete lack of class trainers. I discovered that as I leveled, new abilities appeared on my actionbars, completely eliminating the need to stop whatever I was doing to run back to town to try to find a trainer. I’ll be honest; I found that kind of nice.

The abilities I had to start off with up until level 10, were Shadow Word: Pain, Smite, Power Word: Shield, and Flash Heal. Upon hitting level ten and choosing the Shadow specialization, Smite immediately transformed into Mind Flay. Smite was locked to me from that point on. There are some abilities you get no matter what your specialization is, though. For example, I could still heal myself decently as Flash Heal didn’t go away. However, I don’t think I could manage to heal an entire group that way.

Being the shadow priest lover that I am, there was still more left to do once I was done with the pandaren starting zone. I had to see how things were at the former level cap of 85! Fortunately, beta lets you play with an 85 template, and I created a new pandaren shadow priest that way and was promptly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people in the middle of Orgrimmar. (I come from a tiny server; I’m not used to seeing that many people.) The beta wound up giving you a lot of THINGS when you logged in, namely gems, enchanting materials, and even gear. I had two sets of gear on me, one with spirit and one without. I promptly switched to the set without the spirit as we no longer had anything that converted spirit to hit, rendering spirit pretty much useless for a shadow priest. Also, 5000 gold were waiting for me in my bags. Not a bad place to start off!

I didn’t get very far, as it took me a bit to get used to how certain abilities were triggered and what they did now, but even the short amount of time I spent as an 85 in the beta was some of the most fun I’ve had as a shadow priest in a long time. It was fun trying to figure out how things worked again. I’m still not sure which of the redesigned talents are the most beneficial to me, but, for now, it’s still a ridiculous amount of fun and I can honestly say that I’m looking forward to the release of Mists of Pandaria now. I want to be a bouncy panda priest.

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

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….

On Being a Server Hobo

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I think, as much as I am an altoholic, I’m also a server hobo. There are days when I sit and honestly wonder whether or not I’ll ever happen upon a server I like and want to make a permanent home. It’s funny, because I only seem to really have this problem in World of Warcraft. In LotRO, Landroval has been my home for years. Admittedly, yes, I started on a different server than I play on now. However, I’ve never actually moved off of it. My relationship with the game might be heavily on again, off again, but I’ve contemplated moving servers all of once. I played for a little bit on another one after that, but I immediately came back to Landroval. With SWTOR, it’s a bit too early to tell, as the game has only really been out for about a month. However, with World of Warcraft… oh my.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always a roleplayer in WoW. No, I got my start in WoW on a normal, everyday PvE server with one of my college roommates who was showing me the ropes. From there, I discovered RP servers, and, well, the rest was history. I hung out for a little while on Argent Dawn, then somehow wound up on The Venture Co server for a bit to play with a friend (where I learned RP-PvP was not as bad as I had thought), stopped briefly on Thorium Brotherhood, and then went to Moon Guard. Before Moon Guard, I didn’t really have friends or know anything about a stable RP community. Before then, the concept was kind of foreign to me, as the RPers everywhere else were well-established and, being a noob to the community, I was too nervous to even approach them. But one thing led to another on Moon Guard, and I wound up with a guild and had a good old time on the server. But when the guild started to fragment a year or two later, I realized staying was only contributing to my mental distress, so… off I went to Thorium Brotherhood.

Thorium Brotherhood’s been my “home” for almost three years now. Three years. I honestly can’t believe it’s been that long. Now, I love (most) of the people. The friends I’ve made there have been absolutely wonderful. One would think that, after three years of being on a server, I’d be ready to call it home, right?

Apparently not.

To be honest, I have yet to really get a “home” feeling from any of the servers I’ve been on lately. They’re all wonderful, mind. They’re all great places to go back to, but none of them have felt like “home”. I say differently to other people, but the truth of the matter is that I haven’t actually found a server like that yet. What would it take for me to call one as such in World of Warcraft? I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet. I feel like just as I’m about to start setting down some sort of roots, something happens to completely dig all of those out and then I’m right back to square one. I start setting down a nice rapport with a guild or a group of people, and then suddenly all of that’s gone and then I honestly don’t know what to do. And at that point, when you don’t really have any ties left any more, you pack up and move on again to another server. Sometimes you take your things with you. Other times, you can’t afford to. But you move on, just looking for somewhere you can call home.

I’m jealous of all the people who have stayed on a server for longer than I have. You all have something I’d love to have, but can never seem to find.

The Year in Review

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Well, we’ve had some ups and downs this year, haven’t we? I’ve been quiet for God only knows how long (and, really, I do apologize for that; in the new year, I hope to be blogging so much that you’ll all get sick of me after awhile), I’ve actually obtained a new computer (yay!), but, in the process, lost my graphics programs (boo). However, today marks the close of 2011, and it seems only fitting to do a year in review post, doesn’t it? After all, tomorrow begins the new year.

So, shamelessly borrowing this from Miss Anexxia, today I give you Thyanel’s MMO year in review!

What were you most excited about in the past year?
Too many things to count. Chief amongst them, however, was probably SWTOR. I’ve been waiting impatiently for this game for what honestly seemed like forever, so to finally have the release date and joining the entire fandom in the countdown for it was nothing short of entertaining for me.

Troll druids, and goblin/worgen ladies were also very high up there on the list, and to actually see these things become a reality in World of Warcraft was probably the most fun I’ve had in that game. I was beyond excited to try out the worgen starting area and the redesigned questing zones, and I was most certainly not disappointed.

What was the best thing you bought?
I can’t think of anything major in World of Warcraft, but I can think of numerous things otherwise. Oddly, they’re both mount-related, though. Last night, I finally had enough credits to my name to spring for Vordane’s first speeder and training. I don’t know how I’m going to manage come 40 for the new one, but I suspect I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In Lord of the Rings online, after driving myself insane trying to get the correct amount of tokens given to us during the various seasonal festivals and failing the race once or twice, I finally was able to obtain a Yule Festival Glittering Pony for Anthyllis, my hobbit minstrel. I love this pony so much that I have no intention of riding anything else ever again, and I’m currently in the process of re-dying most of her wardrobe so she can match it.

What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Characters at the various level caps would be nice. I have yet to get a character anywhere near level cap in LotRO, despite it being out for ages, and I’m eager to get Anthyllis further out into the world and on to Isengard.

Also, once I get back to it and am no longer feeling burnt out, more roleplay for Adaret would be fantastic. The girl has been stuck in the closet for far too long.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Probably having enough money to get Vordane her speeder in SWTOR. I honestly thought I wouldn’t be able to do it. Also having enough gold in LotRO to even think about getting a nice little hobbit hole for Anthyllis.

What was your biggest failure?
Not listening to myself, I think. I wasn’t willing to admit to myself that I was feeling a bit burnt out on World of Warcraft at the beginning of December. I love the game still, but I needed a break. It wasn’t until SWTOR came out and I started playing it that I realized the burnout was there, I just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

What do you wish you’d done less of?
WoW: logging in pretty much daily and ignoring the burnout
LotRO: Hiding from the RPing folks on Landroval. They aren’t scary, I just need to tell myself that.
SWTOR: Queues. Oh, god, waiting in queues is terrible. :( Also getting stuck in Taris and stuck watching an elevator slowly moving up and down wasn’t very fun.

What did you do in your MMOs in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Apart from, at the very end, being able to run them in ridiculously high quality thanks to a new computer, probably explore like a fiend. There’s so much to see and do in all of my games, so much so that I never really got a chance to sit and just explore every inch of every world/zone that was there.

What’s your favorite new place that you’ve visited?
WoW: Mount Hyjal. I love that zone. That and Uldum. Two of my favorite zones because of everything ever in both of them.
LotRO: N/A; anywhere I’m able to get to, I’ve actually been before. It’s still pretty cool seeing Weathertop, though.
SWTOR: Probably Dromund Kaas. You get to see Coruscant, albiet a future version of Coruscant, in pretty much every single Star Wars thing ever. Dromund Kaas, nothing. So it’s pretty cool to see the home of the Empire.

What’s your favorite blog or podcast?
I don’t want to pick and choose and offend anybody, but all the bloggers I’ve met and all the blogs I read for any of my MMOs are amazing. We’re all a great bunch of people.

Before this year, though, I hadn’t really touched podcasting before. I’m now a big fan of A Casual Stroll to Mordor, though, on the LotRO front.

Tell us a valuable lesson you learned in 2011.
Have several.

- Admitting burnout isn’t a bad thing.
- Slicing is an awesome way to bring in the money.
- Every community is going to find something to bitch about; take it in stride.
- Not everything wants to be your friend. In fact, most of them will eat you.
- If all else fails, remember that shooting things in the face is a wonderful way to relieve stress at the end of the day.

Noob Tales

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Although I’m not quite certain how this all started, when I returned from work today, I discovered my twitter feed full of various stories from everybody’s noob days in World of Warcraft, told in 140 characters or less. Amused, and taking solace in the fact that I wasn’t alone in my various noob moments (some people having very similar stories to some of my own), I decided to contribute a few of them, myself. It was in the course of contributing a few stories that I recalled an incident from my early Warcraft days in Burning Crusade. Unfortunately, telling this particular story would take up more than 140 characters, so I decided to preserve the tale here, and I encourage others to do the same. After all, none of us started out automatically knowing how things worked. We sort of made it up as we went along and prayed they were right. Unfortunately, sometimes things got a bit messed up along the way…

My first serious character, as many of you know, was a blood elf paladin. Back during the days of Burning Crusade, around level 20 or so, all paladins got their class quest for an epic item. In the case of the blood elves, it was the gorgeous (yet now obsolete) Blood-Tempered Ranseur. However, being that I was completely terrified of dungeons, I avoided the quest. It took me watching multiple blood elf paladins sporting that weapon out in Hillsbrad for me to determine that I had to have it for myself, if only as an RP weapon. Discovering a friend of mine still needed to do the quest as well, he and I, thinking the suggestion of having 5 people in our party was just that (a suggestion), set off for Blackfathom Deeps on foot. (This was back in the days before you got your first mount at level 20.)

However, we quickly discovered a problem. As both of us had been questing out in the Eastern Kingdoms, neither one of us actually knew how to get this dungeon. My friend had maps, but I figured if we followed the road, sooner or later we’d find it. After all, how hard could it really be to find an instance? We had to run off the road in a few places (mostly to avoid patrolling NPCs who would have eaten us for dinner), but we kept running until we got closer to the Darkshore/Ashenvale border.

Then, in the distance, we saw her: a night elf PC. I can’t recall her class, nor do I know what level she was (all we got was a skull at the time, which meant she was infinitely higher than either of us combined), but my friend and I knew one thing with absolute chilling certainty: she saw us. We both froze where we stood on the road and quickly started yammering at each other in party chat. She had seen us. If we ran, she would pursue us and slaughter us both mercilessly. I started to panic on my end of the screen. What did we do?

And then my friend came up with a plan. “Maybe,” he said, “if we remove our weapons, she’ll see that we’re not on our way to raid Darnassus or one of the other Alliance cities!” (Opposing-faction city raids were still a big thing in those days on my server, even before achievements came into the picture.)

So, with our plan in progress and the night elf on her huge-ass epic riding kitty stopping just by our side, we stripped off our weapons and bowed politely to the night elf. She said something, not that either of us could understand it, and she just… stared at us for a good few minutes. However, it soon became apparent that she had no intention of moving.

“Now what?” I asked my friend in party chat.

“I guess we just start walking?”

It was a valid suggestion as any. So my friend and I both set up our characters to walk instead of run and we continued down the road, our new night elf friend in hot pursuit. I continued to panic in party chat (“Why is she following us? OH MY GOD WE’RE BOTH GOING TO DIE HERE! …will our guild avenge us if we do?”). But then something amazing happened. The night elf started to ride back the way she had come! She paused a few times further up the road to see if we were still heading in that direction, but then she eventually disappeared out of sight. Needless to say, my friend and I were both incredibly relieved.

Unfortunately, we didn’t wind up finding Blackfathom Deeps that night. However, it wasn’t until after I had logged off for the night that I learned my friend and I had never been in any danger at all. PvE servers don’t automatically flag you for PvP when you entered contested territory. Unless we were PvP flagged, the night elf couldn’t have killed us at all! All our panicking and flailing had been for nothing whatsoever. Needless to say, I felt a bit silly, but at least I got a good story and a good laugh out of it.

What about you, my friends? Do you have any fun noob stories to share that you can’t tell in 140 characters? Feel free to share them here, if you’d like (or just laugh at mine).

Why Can’t We Be Friends?

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Lately, I’ve gotten back into playing Lord of the Rings Online, and, not all that surprising, I’ve noticed a distinct difference between the WoW and LotRO communities. On the WoW forums, you’re bound to find multiple posts detailing why exactly things are going to hell in a handbasket or complaining about the latest changes. The LotRO forums, however, are different. I’ve seen some posts complaining about different things, but on the LotRO forums, I don’t feel like I’m going to get judged for voicing my opinion, which, I have to say, is kind of nice.

However, there’s something that I’ve noticed in LotRO (both the forums and in-game) that has made me a bit uncomfortable. Now, I’d like to point out that the following behavior is in no way restricted to Lord of the Rings Online. However, this is where I first really noticed it and then began to see similar behavior elsewhere. And, quite frankly, it was a bit disturbing to me.

One night while in game, a new player had mentioned they had come to LotRO from “another game run by Blizzard”. Now, the fact that they would avoid mentioning the name of the game was a bit strange to me, but I didn’t question it. The only other MMO I had ever seen anyone mention up until that point had been Everquest, and that had been on the forums themselves. I could only assume that this person’s WoW experience had been so mind-blowingly horrible that they wanted to avoid mentioning the name of the game at all costs. (Not that I could understand how horrible their experience had been, mind; I’m still quite taken with WoW.) However, the conversation took a rather horrifying turn for me when the chat channels turned into nothing but a stream of how much WoW sucked (mixed with various other expletives that I won’t repeat, mostly because I can’t remember them). I had to log off. I couldn’t take it.

I had thought it was a one-time thing, but then I saw something similar the next night. And then it seemed like I kept seeing it everywhere I went! Rift came out and some people were going on about how superior it was to WoW! WoW players would go on about how it was superior to every other MMO under the sun! Some LotRO players will go on and on about how it’s superior to WoW! It’s like a never-ending cycle of attempting to bask in their own superiority and failing miserably.

The whole thing made me start to think, though. If you strip away the setting-specific things of every single MMORPG out there, you’re left with one main thing: they’re all MMOs. The setting doesn’t matter. The races and classes don’t really matter. They’re virtually the same thing. I may get skewered for saying so, but you know what? Its true. The core mechanics of every single MMO out there are pretty much the same thing. You quest for things, you turn in the quest to get rewards. You heal, you tank, you work together to take down some big bad enemy. You gain levels and new skills and abilities. You get some of the best-looking armor out there.

You guys see where I’m going with this?

At the end of the day, we’re all playing an MMO. Sometimes, we’re even playing for similar reasons. We may want to immerse ourselves in a fantasy world of some sort. We might just want to hang out with friends who play the same game. But the point is, we’re all playing something similar. So why all the hate? Why must there be this mentality of “our sandbox is better than your sandbox”? Why can’t we all just get along?

Maybe I’m some sort of hippie in that regard, but I honestly cannot see why the various MMO communities can’t just coexist peacefully, and, quite frankly, it upsets me. So, guys, please, can we put aside our hate and just share in our love of playing MMOs? At the end of the day, we’re not just Rifters or WoW players. We’re gamers. Why can’t we embrace that?