The Holidays

I’ve been back home with my family for four days officially today. It’s been an interesting three nights, with a baby who apparently has her nights and days mixed up right now, but it’s a fun adventure so far. Lots of diaper changes, bottoms wiped and bottles emptied. I haven’t been able to spend too much time playing anything at the moment, I’m discovering first hand why there are so few new parents in the gaming community, or why those who have children disappear for extended periods of time. Holding an infant and playing an MMO or console game is impossible. TV is the far prefered activity, due to its passive nature and (literally) hands-off interface. On the plus side, I’m getting to watch Season 7 of “24” and already made it through the first three episodes since yesterday.

Jack Bauer, you’re still my hero.

The little time that I have had, I spent mostly in WAR. I did a few more of the missions for EVE and set up some skill training, but didn’t have a lot of time to invest in that. I think my missing out on EVE is what I miss the most right now. I was really jazzed up to play the game, and surprisingly, to stretch my legs in the Sci Fi fiction writing I was doing here along with it. I may pick it up again sometime in the future, but it won’t be any time soon. The gamer in me weeps for missing out on EVE a little. That game is amazing, and I can honestly see myself playing that as my primary MMO. I think I made it over the initial hump of the learning curve, and had settled into the steady path. The first revelation came on my fourth day of playing, when I stopped trying to place arbitrary reference points on anything, and remembered Andrew Wiggin’s lesson from “Ender’s Game”, that directionality is all a personal reference, and holds zero meaning in the expanse of space. Once I accepted that, travel, navigation, and life in EVE became vastly easier.

Still, I can’t be all sad, WAR is an amazing game, that keeps getting better. WHA just put up a poll about this very topic. So far, the few responders have almost unanimously agreed, server stability and performance has had a drastic improvement. That alone should catch people’s attention as it was one of the most decried aspects of the game at release by the WoW tourists (© Syncaine). Some of the game decisions I haven’t been completely keen on. Overall, Land of the Dead has been something I’d rather have done without. It was heralded as a Darkness Falls expansion, when in reality it was closer to Trials of Atlantis as far as I can tell. Instead of being this amazing dungeon full of small-scale PvP, it was a gated zone with instances full of pocket items that became incredibly powerful in PvP (you know, the ones they promised would never have combat effects), as well as throwing in the “* Power” stat. To this day, I still contend they should make the Vulture Lord Dungeon be gated by expedition resources, and the entirety of the zone itself open to anyone who wants to come, with the PQ to kill the enemy zeppelin still around, and THAT be what locks destro out for 15-20 minutes (tops).

On the positive of WAR, they’ve started the process of making the end-game more PvP focused. Stage 1 of the cities has turned into a giant hour long scenario with two warbands on each side, so it’s actually pretty fun now when you have good competition. Additionally, Mythic has started talks about making the second stage more PvP centric. Perhaps when they do that, then the stage 2 warlord instances of the Inevitable City won’t be such a travesty, because in their current state, I’d rather have sex with a tree stump. Mmmm, splinters.

My personal experience in WAR has seen a major uptick of late as well, my guild has been incredibly active, commonly with five to six people online at the same time. We even invited a couple old friends from an old guild to roll with us as they’ve come back to the game. The internal server drama has also been humorous as some guildies/friends that played on Destro for a bit are back with us. The stories of the other side are amusing to me. Not because the enemy players are being portrayed in a bad light, but because the tales and my expectations are matching up almost exactly with each other.

I probably won’t be posting again until the new year, and my plan is to do a look back at my first year of blogging. I’ll show some stats and maybe talk about what was big on my blog, and what I have taken out of this whole experience. Maybe. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Have a happy New Year!