Where did the year go?

Happy Holidays everyone. 

Lesson learned this year: Don't put off shopping until a week before Christamas, because when it snows in Seattle the city shuts down and there's nothing like Christmas with no presents and little food in the house. Boo yah.

Ask and ye shall recieve!

Something I said a few posts ago after noticing that hide helm and hide cloak are now visable to other players:

"Freak yeah! Now if sheath would work, and they'd finally add /sit and /walk I'd be nearly perfectly happy with the game. I really am that easy to please. "

I noticed late last night... night before, they're all jumbling together in my winterbreak screwy sleep schedule, that sheath NOW WORKS. If I put my swords on my hip, people around me actually see it. I was so delighted that I actually turned in wonder to my boyfriend beside me who had just noticed as well. He sheathed and unsheathed his sword and shield and then we both whooped with joy.

And while I'm on the subject, I can't be sure this was wholey my doing but I can't imagine anyone else being lame enough to /bug it so I'm just going to assume.

You know the little level 1 critters that run around? Hares, eagles, deer etc. There are little birds I noticed about a month ago, their name was "blue bird" but while they are indeed blue they're obvious not bluebirds, they're bluejays. There's a big difference in a bluebird and a bluejay.  

So I /bugged it and explained. My boyfriend laughed at me... until last night when we run past a properly named BLUE JAY and I stopped to laugh my arse off.

Death of a Carebear

I had a very well worded, poignant post about the state of ORvR in WAR written in my head. But then I stopped to make the best damn spagetti I've ever had and totally forgot it.

So this will be less poignant, but from a happier viewpoint since I am now full of pasta. 

The past few days have been a roller coaster when it comes to RvR. I've seen the lows, times when I'm so angry at my teammates that I mention to my guild "I almost wish I were Order, just so I could beat the shit out of our allies." And times where... well, we didn't exactly rise to occasion cause I did have to leave one WB (but managed not to call them cowards this time. IC I swear! >.>) but I did have the most fun, challenging and longest lasting RvR battle that I've had since the week after launch. 

So lets start with the lows. A few nights ago in a rare moment of activity Sevren (the smexy pokey witch elf) decided to take part in some keep taking in Dragonwake. It was a fairly mundane, boring run. The sort I've come to expect of ORvR, we took the first keep with no oposition. Hum drum, we claimed a few BOs on our way to the second. Took the second again with little to no oposition. At this point the WB leader declares that we're moving on to Chaos lands. That came at the exact moment that I spotted a group of five or so Order on the outside walls. Being me, I immediately put the word out and stealthed at the bottom of the stairs upward. I stood and watched a dozen people pour out of the doors without a care in the world but two or three others came with me. The order group was obvious organized and balanced in classes and pretty flately owned our hodge podge of DPS in the face. The most amazing (but not so really) thing happened. 

Destruction didn't give a crap. Order continued to pour in through our already open doors, I warned my group that there was enough there to take the keep back. The response was "Who cares, let them take it. Means more loot when we come back through to reclaim".  I and a few members of WB reacted less than friendly, calling them out for avoiding a fight. There was a few minutes of arguement before the WB leader finally spoke up and said, "Ok, Let's forget CoF. Move on to Chaos lands." I saw red, promptly told them "Forget cowards." dropped WB and went back to attempt to at least take out a few while order tramped all over our newly claimed keep. They took it of course, didn't even have to drop a ram. I ended up logging off. I don't get angry during PvP any more, I use to, but I don't any longer. If a member of Order takes me down, good for them. If I run into a group of them, my fault for not paying attention to where I am. How do you fight the conflict avoiding, shiney carrot seeking tendancies of your own side? 

Fast forward to last night. 1.1 brings in the RvR influence rewards. They are, absofreakinglutely awesome. Serious, Sevren's purple set has so much +crit chance that I almost feel sorry for Order. I ended up however, on my low t3 alt (20, just barely. but she's a healer! Deal with it) fighting in Avelorn. And I had a BLAST. Order was really kicking butt, in fact they could have claimed Ghrond's but elected not to. Instead they just stood on the bottom floor and let us come to them. They were very much there for the fight and I LOVED it. It was back and forth for nearly four hours. Things only really trickled off because everyone needed to go to bed. I heard things like "Doesn't Order have to go to work in the morning? Ugh!" a half dozen times in regional. Beaten by bedtimes, feh. It was as a whole, exactly what WAR is suppose to be ... war. And yet, in the middle of the tug of war my warband wanted to play musical keeps again. At this point we'd never lost Ghrond's and had taken a chance after pushing Order back to dash south in Saphrey to take The Well. Apparently, even when Order is still there, still fighting, still pushing and in vast numbers it STILL means that it's time to move on. "Going to Chaos now." my WB leader says. My leveling partner ask, "Why would you leave when there's a fight still raging here?" The answer was of course "More loot." I polietly told them no thanks and found another WB.

I'm ok with it. While they're fighting NPCs and singing kum by ya I had the most fun, intense, long lasting keep defence battle I've ever seen and I really got to push my limits as a healer. It was a beautiful moment. I've PvPed very rarely with my DoK and I really only squeeked by on years of prior healing experience as I frantically tried to keep up with the damage. I'll take that to the Tour de Keep Lord Smashing any day.

People keep saying that Mythic needs to do something to make ORvR more inticing. I think at this point that they've done just about all they can do. At some point, it becomes the the community's fault for not taking part. Honestly, I've been a "carebear" for six years of MMO gaming while playing things like EVE and Lineage2. I was under the impression that the PvPers were blood thirsty, always looking for a fight, always eager to "ruin my fun" by blowing me up while I'm trying to level. Come on now, WAR is currently only proving my long standing point that most of the fun people find in PvP is griefing. If it's concentual, you all would rather avoid it completely? Or is it honestly that people need the carrot? You can't get a gold bag by killing Order, so why should you stay and have fun if it doesn't mean phat loots for you? 

It always comes back to RP

I'm no Syp, that's for sure.

Today marks eight days since my last post and probably once or twice each of those days I started to say something and stopped. Maybe I'm winding down from my 40 push, maybe I'm distracted by the stress of finals week falling on the same week as "holy crap pay rent" week. Maybe a bit of both, I'm just never going to find as much to talk about as others I fear. Ah well.

1.6 has come and gone and in classic me style the most exciting things for me are the lamest for others. There is of course the release of BG which I'll get to in a minute, but for me the most exciting thing was:

Hide cloak and hide helm are working now and visable to other players.

Freak yeah! Now if sheath would work, and they'd finally add /sit and /walk I'd be nearly perfectly happy with the game. I really am that easy to please. 

I haven't rolled a blackgaurd myself (didn't even unlock it actually) but I've been caught up in the alt rush because my boyfriend has and I've rolled a DoK to pair with him. It's exciting to finally get to play these two as we've had their basic character and storyline written and waiting for a month and a half. And as is always the case, watching new characters grow and evolve unprompted as you play them is some of my biggest RP delights. 

/beginRPramble

I tend to play romantic characters... ok, more than tend. I always play romantic characters. It's the girl in me, and I'm super blessed and lucky to have a boyfriend who enjoys that sort of RP as well. In the past we've made a lot of couples with tense relationships, those that didn't get along at first. I've always seen a clear path for how they would likely get from at each other's throats to the mushy stuff but that isn't the case for this go round.

He's managed to make a real and true freaking -bastard-. I absolutely hate his character, on an OOC standpoint as well. He does a wonderful job of being bull headed, bossy, egotistical, single minded, controlling, dominering and down right evil. So much so that he's blind sided both I and my character with his bastardness so much that I have to gap at my screen and take a few minutes to figure out how to respond at times. And I've managed to make a girl so set in her ways, so prideful and confident in herself that the two clash beautifully. If they're out on the battlefield he wins, as in the arguments go his way, he can push her around. If they're in camp, having a meal together or in any other social situation it's "her battlefield" and she's begining to learn how to handle him. But even on "her battlefield" he has the upper hand due to their storyline. But I can not for the life of me see how they're going to come close to a loving relationship, a lustful one perhaps, but not loving. I think she'll always hate him, and he will never love anyone other than himself. But in their own very Druchii way I know they'll eventually meet in the middle and care for each other. This game has really been an eye opener for me in playing evil characters, I'm having a blast.

/endRPramble

With the new alts and having reached 40 Sevren and Telvarian haven't been getting as much playtime. I kind of expected that honestly. There's very little to do at forty other than RvR and it's probably no secret to anyone that I'm not a crazy RvR fan. I like it sometimes, but it's something I tend to take in small doses. We're also the only 40s in our guild and there's only a handful of other t4s. We knew that would be the case though. I'm genuinly dreading grinding off the last few renown levels I need to equip all my Annhilator's set. Ugh, and poor Menkara and Calintz (the alts) have a terrible renown to base level ratio. I RvRed with her before BG came out and had a lot of fun with it, I tend to play healers a lot and this is my first in WAR. But good god, RvR in teir 1 and teir 2 SUCKS SO MUCH currently. I just can't take it. Nine blackgaurd versus eight KoTBS and their runepriest minions. I keep ending up being the only healer. And DoK is just not a healing powerhouse pre-20. I think I'll have fun with it once I get out of this weirdo tank heavy set up it's currently in, but I'm going to be ashamed when I get renown rank 10 at base rank 20 something -.-