The Noob Goes Gallente and Dings 70!

The last week has been a big MMO week for me. First off, my Orc Warrior dinged 70! Now it's dailies, heroics, and PvP for me. This actually happened sooner than I expected, since my desktop went down, and my laptop will not handle Conan or EVE. Thus, it was WoW-o-Rama for awhile, there.

Now, however, my desktop is fully operational again. In personal EVE news, I have stepped down from my director position in Eternity Inc. to join the Gallente militia for Factional Warfare. At the moment, I'm looking for a FW corp to join up with for awhile. I am hesitant to start my own at the minute, but it might come to that, if I don't get any hits on my recruitment thread.

If you have a Gallente FW corp and are looking for a 32M SP PvP specced pilot, look me up.

Also, Drone Bay will record tonight, come Hell or high water. I also managed to get another Rogue Signal up over at Massively, so please check that out.

Non-EVE MMO Experiment Part 2: Tabula Rasa

Well, I've given WoW just under a month, and it's still WoW. It didn't magically turn into God's gift to MMOs in my absence, despite what hordes of fanboys will tell you. It is still a solid game, with massive improvements over when I played originally (back when subscribers were counted with six digits), but it's still just...meh. I paid for 3 months, and will play them out, but I don't see it captivating me.

That said, Alsedrech and I looked at alternatives for our secondary MMO, given that we're both pretty committed to EVE. As you might have heard on the podcast, we downloaded and played the trial for Dungeons and Dragons online. After ten minutes, we both decided we would rather set fire to all our polyhedronal dice than spend another second in that game. It's not a bad game, it's just....ok, it's a bad game. In fact, I blame Gary Gygax's death on the crappiness of that game's UI and gameplay.

Al then gave the LotRO trial a spin, perhaps after feeling guilty for the thrashing we gave Turbine's other MMO over Skype. According to him, it's a great deal better than DDO, but just feels a bit slow. He and I often share game opinions, so I'm willing to let this stand instead of downloading the 7GB client over my very bad broadband pipe.

That brings us to Tabula Rasa. I played this game in open beta and found it to be resoundingly "meh." It was cool, but the innovations still didn't get rid of the feel that I was playing WoW in space with guns. Now that they've added considerable content, and after a few recommendations, I decided to reactivate my account. Al activated an account at the same time.
Thus far our views are...surprisingly good. The game is a lot of fun, and the pacing of the random dropship baddies has made the tempo of the game feel more urgent. I've always been a big fan of the instance cut scenes, and any PUG members who begrudge me watching them every time are taking Lord British in space as a bit more serious business than it really is. Additionally some good game balancing has been done, and they are finally going to give proper re-specs (first one to mention cloning gets a polarity gun to the fifth vertebra). There are still some glaring issues, specifically that having their pinky toe behind a passing ladybug grants a nine foot tall Thrax Officer total cover, whilst standing behind a boulder the size of a small post office seems to do nothing for my situation...and there are dance emotes.

Thus concludes one of the first entries that befits the name of the blog. More to come on our adventures on the Cassiopeia server. If you play on Cass, shoot me an e-mail and we'll go run instances or something.

An EVE Veteran Takes on WoW, Part 1

Many moons ago, back in the dark ages of the internet where downstreams were measured in double digits of kbps, I was hooked on MUDs. Thus, when Ultima Online was announce and later released (while I was in middle school), I simply had to have it. Since then, I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with MMOs. After leaving UO, I pledged never to pay a monthly fee for a game again. I then returned to MUDs. I was happy for awhile. Then came WoW.

My senior year of college, I gave WoW a spin, despite my better judgement, and found I really enjoyed it. My girlfriend even got into it (I love women who game!), so it was a lot of fun. Then the fun just...stopped. I was a level 34 Tauren Druid at the time. For those who remember the older days of WoW, you probably can guess why I stopped. The 30-40 grind used to be just an absolute nightmare. I am a bit of an alt-aholic, so the thought of grinding 3-4 characters through the immense gulf from 30-40 was not high on my priority list. Still, I kept playing for a bit longer with lower level characters, hoping against hope that it'd somehow be easier for other classes or races. I was getting ready to swear off MMOs again when someone showed me EVE. The rest is wreck and frozen corpse laden history.

Recently, however, my timezone (since moving to Japan) has been sub-optimal for participating with my alliance-mates in EVE. Desperate for some kind of real MMO interaction that was a more approachable solo experience, I have decided to give WoW another shot. As was mentioned on the pilot of The Drone Bay Podcast, the very day I got in touch with Al about doing the show for EVE was the same day he was downloading Trinity. What I did not mention on the show was that I was downloading WoW at the same time.

Thus, dear readers, the hard core, pvp-loving, Bitter Old Noob journeys back to the World of Warcraft. Stay tuned for my (mis)adventures back in the land of fairies and elves. Not to worry, though, EVE is my true MMO love, and is not going anywhere.

Due to the lengthy intro, Part 1 will be brief. I have currently rolled 4 characters (remember the alt-aholic thing?), 3 Alliance, 1 Horde. I was hard core Horde back in the day, and even now my highest level is a level 21 Blood Elf Fire Mage on Nordrassil. The Alliance characters I have are a lvl 14 Night Elf Priest (Shadow), a lvl 16 Dwarf Hunter (Beast), and a lvl 12 Dranei Paladin (Ret), all on Ghostlands. Thus far, I must say that the game has come a very long way from what I remember. Al has promised that the grinds have become much fewer and further between, and much shorter when they do happen. The game has the same cartoony style, but I think that they have demonstrated that this style ages much more gracefully than the more realistic approach of DDO or EQ.

Thus far, I'm still in pretty easy level country, and have yet to take my mage to Wailing Caverns, so I'll update more when I have actually been in an instance again.

I am enjoying WoW for now, but the real test will come when Conan and Warhammer Online finally come riding over the horizon. Until then, LFG.

"But my zombie lady made pretty dresses!": Why My Girlfriend Does Not Play EVE

Women in EVE, and MMOs in general, has been a topic of discussion for a very long time. We young to middle aged men sit around and wonder (well, some of us do) why more of our girlfriends and spouses are not banging down the server door to come sit in asteroid fields and mine with us all day, or to camp a stargate for 4 hours with no kills, or wade through 5 hours of lag to conduct a POS siege, or deal with can flippers when running missions in empire. All that said, I’m not sure I’ll be logging into EVE today. All the same, there are nearly a quarter of a million of us who play EVE like it is a religion, but a very small number of those players are female. When I asked my girlfriend why, in my view, games like WoW have a higher proportion of female players, her honest response was, “Well, I don’t play EVE because I liked making dresses with my zombie priest lady in Warcraft.”

This got me to thinking. My girlfriend played WoW with me for a few months until I got sick of it and went to EVE, and before that we played Ragnarok Online together for a couple of months before I got tired of grinding for cute bunny ears and went to WoW. In both cases, it was not the hardcore gameplay that attracted her. She liked running the quests and killing the monsters, but enjoyed playing dress-up more than smash-up, and she also got more into the social and role play aspect of the guild we were part of than the raiding and grinding. This is not to say that she was playing virtual Barbies. There was a great deal of focus for her on character-driven story and a personal experience driven by tangible character development, something that EVE often lacks. This is obviously not true of all, or perhaps even most, female gamers. I know a few women in EVE’s Mercenary Coalition who are as rough and tumble as they come. It can’t be ignored, however, that this desire for a more social and character (and pretty dress) oriented style of gameplay is an attraction to at least some female gamers.

Also, for her at least, the aesthetic model of the game just isn’t appealing. While talking to her for the material of this entry, I asked whether Ambulation, the ability for EVE players to exit their stuffy (and probably smelly, after 4 years) capsules and walk around in space stations, scheduled for release some time around the Second Coming. She said that it would only be interesting if it was the norm for gameplay, but that she suspects (rightly so, I think) that the main thrust will still be watching “your gray blob float in the big black blob.” In WoW and RO, she enjoyed watching her character change as it progressed, and the ability to customize equipment. For me, this concept is rather alien, as it has always been the game impact of the customization that I am concerned with rather than if these blasters go with that microwarp drive, or if my armor plating is so last season.

So, why don’t more women play EVE? I honestly have no idea. All I know is why my girlfriend doesn’t play. If you have a girlfriend or spouse who is a gamer (all five of us), but does not care for EVE, please ask her why. I would be very interested in building a stronger discussion on this. Also, if you are a woman who plays EVE, or if you know one, please ask her what keeps her logging in. My theory is that there are a significant number of female gamers out there who feel that playing a character that is essentially yourself in a big phallic spaceship is not as interesting as playing a character of a fantasy race with its own story, appearance, etc. Obviously CCP shares some of these beliefs, as I have heard it mentioned that Ambulation is partially going to target the elusive female gamer. If these presumptions are wrong, they need to be corrected. Speak up, ladies! Show us dense males what it is you want in the game. It’s not like we men have the best track record knowing what women want in any situation, so it’s hardly surprising that game development is any different. The ways of females are mysterious, and trying to explain why they make certain decisions often leaves me feeling like the chimps in 2001, just banging away at the obelisk with no real results until I eventually forget why I tried in the first place.