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

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Thyanel

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

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Thyanel

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

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Thyanel

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.

Roleplaying Flags and How to Love Them

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Thyanel

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.

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Thyanel

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.

There’s No Place Like Home…

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Thyanel

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

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Thyanel

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.

Pen and Shield

Tag Archives: World of Warcraft