Starting off

I've done the blog thing before with various incarnations of the form; livejournal, myspace, etc. But I've always been a bit reluctant to blog in anything involving World of Warcraft. Not that I'm ashamed of my hobby, I've been playing MMORPGs since '97. Its been a long hard road with the genre, it started with Ultima Online and The Realm for me. But to tell the truth, I'm a MMO whore, I played everything and still to this damn day play those betas that appear on Fileplanet about new MMOs. T.T Pity me.

It was a breakneck experience for me, when I got into it. Online gaming was still an infant and FPS was the fancy of the day. As time has gone on, I've watched 2d go to 2d overview to 3d polygons to wireframes to whatever the hell is used now. I honestly barely can keep up with the latest innovations in making the games look cool, I'm just content to go beta test and play my joy of joys.

WoW though is a bit of a vice though, I mean I spent from '99 to '05 playing Everquest. Now that game had crack level addiction down, what else could explain thousands of people shelling out 20-30 bucks every 2 months, which was about the time between expansions. Looking back, it was beyond retarded. Looking at the progress SOE has made these days with EQ2 and updates that have content in them, taking a deep cue from Blizzard's smart marketing sense with WoW, quite interesting. I have this feeling though, that Blizzard is slacking in delivering their new content. They're allowing WoW to take a stagnant pace.

Now, when it comes to the MMORPGs, I look to two things. One is the raid content, I love to raid (My god, I drool with boyish wetness at great raid encounter. Nothing like a couple dozen of your fellow players cursing at fiendish game designers and tossing back their beverage of choice). Two, Player Versus Player combat. Woohoo, fighting another human without messing consequences. Gamers as much as we try are just highly competitive and AGGRESSIVE! PvP definitely weeds out those without the stomach for long hard fought battles of mindless grinding for hours upon hours, sounds like farming to me.

Now, I stay in EQ for the longest time because I got hooked into an extensive Storyline with Raid Encounters, not the PvP. I mean, yeah, PvP servers were kicking places of ABSOLUTE TERROR! I still have nightmares of fiendish gankfests from the Shadows of Luclin expansion. I mean really now, people talk about raid encounters in WoW like you're fighting gods. 25 man? 40? What about 70 man? Oh yeah, been there, done that in EQ and those were some fucked up encounters. My first raid encounter in EQ was a dragon, lil lvl 50 human monk of Freeport origins. Now some my know this dragon, Lord Nagafen.
Back in '99, Naggy was the beast and terror, awesomeness of loot and challenge to kill. It was epic and I was like, "This is nuts. We gotta fight that?!" Typing furiously in guild chat, no vent or ts in those days kids. We had to wait two resets to finally down him (for those going que? back in EQ's infancy, there were no instances, basically the raid boss would spawn after a server reset and people would scout to see if so and so was up, you got your raid together on that spot and went at it, if you wiped and were done, another guild would come in, it sucked but this was how it was until around late 2004 when they started instancing, but it was no where what it is today in EQ2 or WoW). Shenanigans!

I digress and do this often. I guess to just say, I am a raider at heart and always will be. I've never minded sitting for 5-8 hours in front of a PC banging my head on the desk, monitor, keyboard and back of my chair. The feeling of the well-oiled machine known as a raid pwnin' beasts from the beyond is my digital crack.

I guess I have joined the bandwagon of my guild known as Aetherial Circle on Drenden. We're apparently the most bloggiest blogging guild in WoW. If you listen to the hype.

Until I get some more juice.