I don’t need to explain at this point about the recent comments from Richard Bartle and the response by the MMORPG community. If you haven’t been following it there is a good link explaining it better than I ever could. Me doing this post at this date, have sadly missed the height of this topic that has been circling around the blogging community. Maybe I can dredge up sour memories and beat that dead horse a little more.

I have to admit that before I read Wolfhead’s post I had no idea of who Richard Bartle was: “The God Father of MUDS”, “The Creator of Virtual Worlds”. I once tried playing a MUD early in my university days. I didn’t get it. I loved the text adventures that I had played on my friend’s Apple IIe but MUDs seemed like too much work. I never hung around with the right geeks to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It wasn’t until as recently as the past couple of months that I have tried playing D & D.

In regards to the Bartle controversy I actually had more fun reading people’s comments. There were many thoughtful responses as well as many hilariously childish responses.

As far as I broke it down was that the MMOGs that were out right now and under current development were being accused of being copycats of each other and innovation was being compromised over polish and streamlining. Why play Warhammer when we all have played World of Warcraft? By reading the actual text I know that this comment was meant as tongue-in-cheek and was taken out of context. The main message put out was that developers were not innovating and creating true virtual worlds. They were more content on following Blizzard’s business model and createing a “fishbowl” of a game. Fishbowl being a virtual world that never changes with a very strict set of rules that limits the player’s ability to mess around with things.

Do we really want the “Sandbox” virtual world that Bartle suggests that we should all be playing in? I for one have seen Second Life. It’s not a game. It is a virtual world created by players in a no limits environment. By abbreviating all MMORPGs (Massivley Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) as MMOs, people wrapped up in this controversy seemed to have forgotten the “G”. World of Warcraft is a really fun game. So is Everquest 2. They have different rules different limitations but I have played them both and they are really fun games. I used the word “games” many times to emphasize that I am not playing an MMOW.

WoW and EQ2 and all the other titles could be compared to playing the board game of Monopoly. Where Second Life, or the much talked about Virtual Worlds can be compared to Playdough. They are both fun, but different kinds of fun.

To answer my question I asked above, to come down to it, PEOPLE ARE JERKS. Yes Jerks. Given the opportunity to take advantage of, or humiliate another player for any little reason they will do it. And this is where my discussion comes into my experiences from World of Warcraft.

I imagine if the player base from WoW had the ability to create things that you can create in Second Life, I can guarantee that within 5 minutes there would be player made penis creatures attacking me with ghonnoreha fire balls.

Being a new player with no gold, I have quested gear. With areas completely devoid of players or others my level to complete instances with, the only other enemy players that I come into contact with are twinks that are speed leveling to 70. I think I win about 1 out of 3 PvP encounters. For this reason it has been advised to me that I should not expect to win a fair fight in Battlegrounds because they are filled with bored level 70s who have level locked lowbies with twinked gear. Already when I get beat at a PvP fight I get corpse camped and teabagged. One clever Orc that corpse camped me had learned how to take the orc language as it appears to me to say “A N A L”. Are you telling me that someone who took the time to translate Orcish into “A N A L” wouldn’t take the time to create a diarrhea emote? I know if I had the time to devote that is the FIRST thing I would do. For sure my character would have an “Ass-Helmet” with an everlasting sparkler sticking out of the business end.

Why? Because people are jerks. We take everything pristine and untouched and try our best to make a joke of it.

Blizzard know this and that’s why they have a fun fish bowl of and MMOG with multi-millions of subscribers and barely a fraction of those have heard of Second Life. Sony and Mythic also know this and want as many people as they can to subscribe to a game where their players wont get virtually pooped on.

The best business model ever: “Warhammer. A game where we are pretty sure you wont get pooped on”. You can use that if you want Mythic. But I require a royalty check in the mail each month along with my free subscription.

The Everquest 2 posts have not been very frequent lately. Mostly because I haven’t been playing it.
 
After quitting raiding, the excitement I had with EQ2 had faded really fast. I completed a number of solo quests, got my fabled Band of Thuuga, got the fabled version of my class Epic weapon, and brought an alt to level 76. My wife was playing World of Warcraft and my friends were playing World of Warcraft as well. I was grinding faction in Kunzar Jungle with my alt when I came to the realization that I wasn’t having fun anymore.

What happened? I took me while to figure out exactly what happened but it all came to me at once.

When I was in the raiding guild and RoK came out, our guild officers and leaders put a deadline on when we had to be level 80 to be prepared to hit RoK raid content. My wife and I did our best to grind through the content. We were both kind of enjoying ourselves because the content was aimed at the solo quester. It gave us a chance to relive the old days of EQ2 when we were unguilded and we had to experience almost all the game content together in a duo. We blasted through RoK in less than 3 months. We found ourselves not quite level 80 with no more quests to do. The rest of our guildies, a little bit more hardcore than us, were already 80 and dragged us through heroic instances and eventually we dinged. We didn’t once stop to “smell the roses”; we ate up content like it was going out of style.

With raiding out of the picture, heroic quests out of the way, and all solo content gone there was nothing left for us to do except level alts. I had a Troubador that was in his 30’s and decided to bring him to level 80 along with my Shadowknight.

The minute I broke into RoK content I became extremely bored. I had done this all before. I logged in less and just came in to the game to check the broker, I tried to get into groups with my Troubador but being in that “no mans land” of mid 70’s I wasn’t strong enough for any of the instances that people wanted to run.

On a whim I loaded World of Warcraft on my PC using a 10 day trial account. I created an ugly looking gnome Warlock. I found the appearances to be aweful. I had described my character to my friends already playing WoW as a cross between Danny Bonaduce and a buttplug. After playing out my trial I went out a bought the battle chest at my local Walmart.
 
I am now an about to be a level 21 Warlock, mildly enjoying my experience. I find lots of things quirky and un-intuitive about WoW. I am so used to EQ2’s controls and interfaces I find thing really frustrating. I have fun playing though. I am also curious about how the game changes when I come into more contested lands and do the PVP thing.

Yesterday something really unusual happened. I logged into my EQ2 account after about a month of not playing. The same annoying people were making the same annoying jokes in 70-79 chat. The same people were standing at the broker. I went to the Character Create screen and made a new toon on a different server.  I had never left my server before and thought about not having my sugar daddy level 80 to finance gear, spells and supplies. It was very liberating. No one knew me. Blank slate. I started in Timorous Deep in which I had never adventured completely in and began a career as a Ratonga Dirge. I actually had fun playing. The time passed quickly and before I knew it I was level 11.

I think I realized that I didn’t hate EQ2. I just hated my server. I don’t know how long my little Dirge will last or if I’ll keep playing him. I may lose my mind the instant I walk into Ruins of Varsoon.

I am definitely going to stick with WoW for the time being to see how things turn out and give it a fair chance. I have some really good friends playing it and my wife likes playing it. For now that’s good enough for me.

On Friday night I was at a party at a friend’s house. After a few drinks and food, one of the guys there said to me, “You ever play Guitar Hero?”

“No. I’ve heard about it. Isn’t it just Dance Dance Revolution with a fake guitar?”

“Lemme show you”, he said as he turned on his big screen TV, clicked on the surround sound, and fired up his PS3.

Flash forward 2 hours later.

“THIS IS FREAKIN’ AWESOME!”

The car ride home was spent with me talking about how much fun we had playing old Poison songs and trying to master “Slow ride”. Ofcourse I was the ultimate noob playing it and the host amazed us all by pulling off the most difficult songs, never giving into my requests for him to play Slayer.

On Saturday night I was at a different friend’s house. As we arrived he said, “C’mon downstairs we have Rockband fired up.”

“No shit! I just played Guitar Hero last night for the first time. It was freakin’ awesome.”

“Wait till you try this”, he said with a smirk.

Flash forward 2 hours later.

“THIS IS FREAKIN’ AWESOME!”

The car ride home was spent with me trying to figure out the the finacial means to acquiring a big screen TV, a surround sound, a PS3, and Rockband. Oh yeah I NEED 2 guitars so I guess I also have to get Guitar Hero as well. Having fun is so difficult sometimes.

Since leaving raiding my productivity in game has been awesome.

This weekend I finally finished my Shadow Knight epic weapon quest. I wasn’t planning on doing this quest but the opportunity to do Maiden’s Chamber came up.

I have been working on an alt lately, a Troubador, and have been stuck at lvl 74 for what seems forever. While questing in Kunzar Jungle a call came up from a guildie for a Crypt of Agony run. At level 74 the XP was pretty good, and after not screwing up at all I was asked to continue onto Maiden’s Chamber. The Discovery XP alone was awesome and I soon dinged 75. Drusella, the main boss, was too much for the group and I brought Warghoul in the tank the final encounter. I got the update for my epic weapon for killing the boss and quickly organized a Vaults run. Another update down. One named away from finishing, I convinced the group to come to Neriak with me to complete this quest that had taken me over 4 months to complete.

After a cool encounter with a giant Shadow Knight I found my sword under the bed of the Princess in the Royal Palace.

I quickly adorned “Sedition” with a 3% chance to block and I’ve been slicing though mobs ever since. To test the power of my newly acquired weapon I decided to progress on yet another epic line of quests to get the Fabled “Band of Thuuga”.

I put the Troubador on auto follow along with a Defiler and have powered through this quest. In 1 day I am on the last couple of steps from a really cool item for each of my toons. If there are any SKs out there that read this and have not got your epic weapon yet I urge you to make this a priority. Aggro issues have gone down tenfold. It’s really easy to get aggro control now on mobs and the DPS I’m putting out is unreal. I can only imagine what the fabled version of this can do.

Kind of makes me want to get back into raiding just to see how I parse.

After much debate my wife and I have quit our raiding guild. We have been thinking of doing this for a long time but it had come time for us to leave. One of the reasons was that raiding was becoming another job for us. We had a boss getting on our cases; raid leader, and had a time table to follow and evenings to commit. When we realized that we just weren’t enjoying it anymore we decided to give our 1 week notice, LOL, and leave. We also found that we had no desire to log in to play just by our selves or do grouping. We hadn’t even thought about finishing our epic weapon quests or many of the other quest lines.

To tell the truth it was quite hard leaving. We had unspent DKP, just wanted that one last piece of loot that would set us up, just wanted one more boss kill to finish a quest. It was like quitting a drug habit. The hardest part was the friends we left. After we left the raiding guild we went down into the alt guild. Everyone was still there most of the time but when raid time came everyone cleared out and there we were alone with nothing to do. At least that’s how it felt the first week. I believe that was our detox period. Can you tell I’ve been watching Celebrity Rehab?

My first order of business was to get my wife’s Defiler her epic. In one day we got pick up groups from guidies and whoever could help out. Mainly we duod most of the quest line, realizing the difference raid gear made in everyday questing, things came to us quite easy. We finished the majority of the quest and left Maiden’s Chamber to return to the next day. We logged in the next evening to find that a guild group was about to kill the last boss. After much eyelash batting on my wife’s part she was swapped in and easily got the quest update.

All that remained was the final psychedelic portion where we entered a dream world. This was the most unique instance I have so far done in EQ2. Basically it was a small instance based off the Shard of Fear, except everything was in a sick shade of yellow and swooped and swerved. Using 4 people in the group we easily defeated the encounter and we got the epic weapon, Dream Scorcher.

My second order of business is to get Warghoul’s Shadow Knight Epic. Yesterday I assembled a group and quickly dispatched Karnor’s Castle. Our group got some nice loot, Drolvarg Lore & Legend book, 2 got their level up to 76, and finished by completing the ring event to kill Xalgoz in the basement. I then dragged my group to Teren’s Grasp to kill a named and then convinced our group to head to The Shard of Fear. After quickly burning though the instance my guildies were called to raid and my wife and I logged out of the game to enjoy the rest of our evening out of game. I have 2 instances to complete and 1 named to kill in Neriak.

It seems leaving the raiding guild has been quite productive for us. I can totally see us leaving the alt guild due to the temptation to ask to come back into raiding. That coupled with the fact that the alt guild is quite lonely at times. Maybe I think it’s lonely because I wasn’t hearing people being berated in Ventrillo during a raid, or being the center of some server drama caused by over zealous guildmates. I can definatly say though that EQ2’s volume has been significantly turned down. We are also thinking checking out some different games. Age of Conan looks kind of cool. At least now I don’t feel I’m letting others down for not showing up to play.