Respawn Timer Lag

Howdy folks? Thought the blog is dead? Yeah, me too…. As I stopped playing WAR, world’s financial pyramid system fell, turmoils in personal life happened, and so on… But just recently a comment notice came to my e-mail, I looked, and considered for a moment – is this blog baby dead after it’s first steps? I don’t know, but I think it still deserves a chance…

The blog will shift more into different genres. Also, I currently play Eve, Dungeons & Dragons Online, some Free 2 Play games, but WAR is over for me.

I will possibly drag in some tabletop gaming and maybe not even gaming related things, as well…

Stay tuned!

The Evil That Men Do…

As you may have noticed, I am playing Destro, more precisely, Chaos Chosen in WAR.

Let the “NOOb! L2P!” and “EMO destro rarwrrr sucks!” screams calm down, and I shall explain.

I am playing computer games for approximately 9-10 years. In the beginning there was no option in games to do something else besides saving the world, princess, your village or generally bashing the EVIL creeps because they had come out of their caves, or pits, or whatever dank, smelly and dark place you can stuff evil away.

I cannot remember correctly which game – it MAY be Warcraft 2 – I started that offered a CHOICE. There I could play Orcs as an alternative to knights and elves and rampage around like Mongol horde, taking everything and killing everyone. Well, the gameplay was not changing by an inch, the map design and missions were exactly the same, but at least I could lead DIFFERENT sprites than the guy next door… And individualism was always something important for me, I was always infuriated when in fighting games somebody else liked MY character, a trend that is still alive in my mindset (bastards stop stealing my colour scheme!!!)  😀 Weirdest and most funny thing, all of my gaming friends at those times played with humans and couldn’t fathom being orcs and fighting against good… And I was immediately percieved as enemy, they started to hide cheat codes and gameplay secrets from me and refused to tell me, because I was different. And I knew this feeling pleased me in an obscure way.

Later years came, and I found myself even more different, listening to more and more extreme metal music (although this love started even before my gamer period) and finding pleasure in art that many percieved as bordering on sick or at least ugly. For example, I really thought zergs in Starcraft were beautiful and Kerrigan quite hot.

Another path that later intertwined with previous and led me to Evil, was the philosophical matter. I will not go in depth about my perception of world consisting from shades of grey or good being the reacting and evil the acting force, as this is not time and place for this timeless discussion, but gradually my tabletop and PC RPG characters became more and more eager to follow the Dark path, for I can accept almost any price in my neverending quest for power.

And, as I told in a post some time ago, I found Warhammer and fell in love immediately with setting(s)… And my side of choice was set from the beginning. Nowhere else there exists a more METAL, hungry for power, aesthetically stunning, philosophically convincing force than Warhammer Chaos… So now I have Warhammer 40000 Chaos Marines force, hopefully soon I will start Warriors of Chaos for Fantasy WH…

Then WAR came out. I never faltered about the choice of side. For me, this online game EXISTS so that I can play a virtual representation of me as warrior of my beloved Chaos. No cries of disbalance (whom I believe to be exaggerated) or bonuses offered for smaller Realm, nor disbalanced classes (KotBS) (arguable) will make me change my stand for what I believe.

As for disbalance issues, I already mentioned that I think it to be exaggerated and artificially blown issue (flame me baby), and I do not believe it possible for 4% population disbalance to ruin the game. And stop crying that numbers are incorrect, I play on Karak-Azgal,where order recieved minority bonuses, but in tier 2-3 I see Order zergs (blasphemy!!!!) constantly overwhelming us.

And now, to say something completely egoistic, bad and controversial, if this game, as impossible as it is in my opinion, dies from population disbalance in favor of Destro, then Chaos has won in this instance and my mission completed.

Sorry folks, too much forum reading about doomsday population imbalances and Destro emos. I promise I will try to be nice next time.

Backpack madness…. and financial problems

I know Keg End has ended.

But I still have a gripe with the Battle Brew backpack.

For me it wasn’t the hardcore grind many have complained about. I was one of those lucky bastards for whom it dropped in the first hour of the day I logged in and Keg End had started. I remember I even wondered if it really was so rare, but, much to my enjoyment, posts in many blogs and forums proved it was. The collective despair and pain of those posters was feeding my virtual ego quite a bit… But there is one thing I cannot forgive myself.

I equipped it.

Next time when I was in the Inevitable City and went to the auction house, I saw 2 BBBackpacks there. The price vas ranging fom 100 to 200 gold.

And my backpack was already bound to me.

I understand that it is a rare event item, but, if i had known the possible price before, I would NEVER have equipped it. Come on, I already knew I will find a better cloak item to wear, and the novelty and posing rights of having such a rare thing would wear off quickly. I also do not understand the people who buy it… Well, maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t feel exactly cool if I had bought it…. It is, in essence, an item to show how lucky or determined a mob exterminator you are.

And 100 g.

I know many would find it hilarious, but I am in constant need for money in the game (well, in real life too, but that’s a different story). Being a compulsive spender both in and out of game, I guess I will never change. My friends say I have an armor dyeing fetish, BUT if I equip a new piece, it MUST be colored in my character’s overall color scheme, otherwise it’s ugly and not stylish at all. Also, when I get a new level (my alt, which is steadily becoming my main, is lvl 25), I jump on a wyvern and rush to the auction house as gold diggers rushed to Klondike in 1899 . There, with savage glee in my eyes, I search for any items appropriate for my new level and try to buy everything that is better than my current gear. I know, I know that I will probably find better items as quest rewards, from PQs or otherwise, but I cannot help it – I must be geared in the latest fashion and dyed accordingly. Not to mention from time to time my colour scheme changes, because I meet someone ingame with the same or similar scheme, and that I cannot stand.

And I have a bunch of equippable barrels of beer, potentially worth 100g in the AH, but they’re actually worthless now, because I tore off the wrappings. And that backpack doesn’t even fit my style. NEVER. Never again will I make the same mistake.

Why WAR?

In my first blog post ever besides the greeting, I would like to explain WHY exactly am I here and in the game itself.

Many Warhammer Online players are veterans from other MMOs, be it WoW, DAoC or any other famous or not-so-famous online game. They are people with experience and passion for MMOs, also with expectations about what an online game should be like.

This is not my case.

I have always lived close to MMOing, many of my friends are online gamers, but I never shared this passion. I dabbled a bit in Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, couple of Asian free-to-play games, played WoW for a month, but thats was never exactly MY thing. I am mostly a single-player RPG fan, and I have always thought that MMOs fail at the very point of being an RPG – the immersion and story, the feeling of an interactive movie where you are the main hero and make decisions that affect the course of the story and sometimes the fate of the world, even the universe around you. In my opinion, that this amalgam of Choice and Immersion is what defines an RPG, not lvling and changing your gear.

I am also playing a lot of tabletop games, including Warhammer 40000, and, hopefully soon, also Warhammer Fantasy. Having been a tabletop RPG game master for some years, I have run campaigns in both Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Warhammer 40000 setting, which recently got an official RPG ruleset – Dark Heresy.

Warhammer’s both settings -40k and Fantasy- have an almost religious value for me. I have delved in them for quite a few years, and their richness, uniqueness and depth seems unsurpassed to me. I have also become something like a living Warhammer encyclopaedia for my friends, the man who “always knows more” and to whom they come asking for background and setting details.

Then I found out about the upcoming Warhammer MMO. Not the one you see and play now, but the first one, that was in the works a couple of years ago. The project was canceled, and soon after that WAR was announced. Although I think that Climax had captured the look of Warhammer world better, alas, life is life and we have to move on.

The advertising and hype, masterfully crafted and using the instant win people who are Mark Jacobs and Paul Barnett, touched me. I got more and more anxious and anticipating, until the birthcry of the open beta. Although it wasn’t an easy birth, as I am playing on European servers and we had many troubles with the open beta (yay error 404!),I eventually got a virtual incarnation in one of my most beloved settings.

The initial hype drained away, as it did for many players, and it became clear that, although WAR is a great game for a MMO (at least to me), it is far from perfect yet. I, for one, think that this game is getting huge improvements and it is getting better almost on a daily basis. So I am still here and I am not intending to leave soon. It is Warhammer, after all.

From North He Came…

So, hello everyone who has had a fortune (or misfortune) to accidentally stumble upon this page!

This is my Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning blog. It is also my first blog whatsoever. I have been thinking about starting something like that for a long time, but, given my inborn laziness, never actually tried to do anything, until the announcement of ” WAR: Age of Blogging” in Syp’s blog I read daily. So I started this page you see here, and, while it may take some time while I get used to this fancy technological device of porting my thoughts into internet, you are welcome to see the results.