Lord of the Rings

This weekend was filled with “real life” stuff, leaving little time for gaming… but I did get some time in now and then. I went ahead and made a kinship (called, unsurprisingly, Nostalgia) on the Windfola server in Lord of the Rings Online – just to make it easier to talk with everyone. I’d prefer to be in some larger guild but I imagine it would be tough to find one that everyone liked. Small guilds, like this one, have an arc. They rise and then linger on for awhile before fading away. ...

If Bilbo could see me now, why, he’d be talking about how he (with maybe a very little help from a certain gray-robed wizard) kept three trolls arguing until morning light turned them all to stone. He wouldn’t approve of what I do at all, why, not one little bit. “Un-Hobbit-like!” he’d yell. “It’s just not how things are DONE!” he’d exclaim. “Even the Old Took would think twice! And then twice more! And then have a good smoke about it!” ...

I loaded Lord of the Rings Online back onto my computer (where it replaced Vanguard and Guild Wars; my disk space is such that if a new game goes on, an old game has to come off). I’m not sure how I felt about the game. I’d not left it on the best of terms; after a bit of excitement, LotRO had settled into a series of horrid grinds. Kill N of X. Run to some far off place, and then run back. ...

Check out that xp bar! Less than one bubble to 46… I was tired and tuckered out last night from two late nights of programming image filters (the latest result is the candy-colored candy shop seen in my ShutterCal widget), but while a test image rendered, I thought maybe I’d just jump into Wizard 101 and see if Suri was up for a trip through Big Ben or Kensington. I love running through Big Ben. ...

I’ve had my level 75 cleric on Luclin for about… four months now. The level cap on EverQuest is 80. There have been three expansions since I last played her, The Serpent’s Spine, The Buried Sea and Secrets of Faydwer (I played TSS just long enough to get to level 75). A new expansion, Seeds of Destruction is about to come out. And I don’t care. I haven’t even joined one group her level. Because I know what my job will be – sitting on my ass watching other people have fun while I press the heal button occasionally. Doesn’t matter what level or what expansion, my job was the same. Same as when I was a rogue. Druid was a little different; when the druid was my main, I could solo well, or be bad at stuff in a group. They’ve since made druids better in groups and given clerics the ability to solo somewhat, but really, my complete frustration at the mindless repetition of playing EverQuest, combined with the difficulty of finding a group, drove me to quit. I only came back for the Nostalgia group, but once again, I find I have zero interest in leveling, except insofar as I get to see areas of the game one last time. SoD may well raise the level cap to 100 and promise pie, but there is absolutely nothing that will get me to willingly join the grind again. ...

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too – my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning. ...

A feature of mine about good games that DON’T have Warcraft in their names and could use some well-deserved love is up on Massively. Check it out, let me know what you think :)

From a comment on Tobold’s excellent post about the tank shortage in the World of Warcraft (or more accurately, the Protection-spec’d Warrior shortage): I’ve been playing WOW for 2+ years now and everytime I see pvp hurt pve, it makes me wish there was a viable pve alternative to WOW. I happen to think there are plenty of viable PvE alternatives to WoW. Not least among them EQ2, but also LotRO (the breakout MMO of 2007, by anyone’s definition viable), Pirates of the Burning Sea, FFXI Online and literally hundreds of smaller MMOs, most of them free to play, most of them with very dedicated and helpful player bases. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Vanguard these days. ...

2007 opened with me splitting my time between EQ1 and EQ2. Through brief flings with LotRO, Dungeon Runners and Mythos, and even briefer flings with a half dozen more I played just once, I ended the year in pretty much the same place – playing EQ2 exclusively. There’s these incredibly massive hype/PR machines and all they want to do is build up expectations for their ground-breaking, world-shaking title, or book, or movie, and then when it finally arrives, you go “meh” and wait for the next big thing. And the hype machine worked overtime this year. Burning Crusade, Vanguard, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa; all have (or had) the hype machine promissing so much that almost anything that came (or will come) can only disappoint. ...

2007 has been an amazingly full year, considering some of the major games we were hoping to play (Gods & Heroes, Age of Conan) were canceled or delayed. In January, I was still living in San Diego, still hoping that Sigil or SOE would finally read one of my resumes… on the 8th, the company in Carlsbad where I worked downsized their IT department from two people to one, and I was on the street. I found nearly immediately that spammers have taken over the job search websites as well as everything else on the Internet, and learned some hard lessons about telling real opportunities from spam opportunities (which aren’t opportunities at all, of course). Gaming suffered, since I had to spend all my time preparing cover letters, arranging interviews and so on. I was very much getting into the Star Trek Online community, and looking forward to Lord of the Rings Online, which I had pre-ordered. ...