Hiyama and myself have moved closer to work. I am working the overnight shift for 6 months. Hiyama was promoted to a manager at his store. Needless to say the past few months have been crazy.

Everything seems to be settling down now. I am unable to blog from work but I have found a solution in an iPhone app.

On top of all that my Blizzard Mobile Authenticator is giving me issues so I am waiting on Account Services to deactivate it, hopefully they will be done today.

I am just glad to be back in the blogging world.

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How long have I been playing MMORPGs?

Well it all started for me in1991 with AOLs Neverwinter Nights. I was 13 then and thought that the game was really cool. No body else at my school was playing it so it made the game special to me. Everyone else was playing Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. I still like the old console games but I think this was the time I realized MMORPGs would always have a special place in my heart.

I played AOL-NWN until 1996 when I joined the military then I didn’t play any games for about a year. I was in Italy in 1997 and heard from a friend in the US that this game Everquest was all the rage. Well not being able to have my own internet in the dorms overseas, I had to wait until 1999 when I came back to the US to play MMORPGs. So during the time I played any and all table-top games I could find a group for. In 1999 I got my first computer and bought EQ and I think it was the first expansion, I loved the game alot.

In 2000 I moved to South Korea and still played EQ. Some of the people I worked with were going to play a game called Asheron’s Call. So I decided to take a break from EQ and play AC instead. That was a fun year of drinking, game playing and deployments.

I went back to Italy after Korea and still played AC. I got back into EQ when a friend told me abotu the game and how things had changed over the past year. So I would play AC and EQ on alternating days. When out of the blue Shadowbane was the flavor of the month. I had never participated in any PvP before and foudn the game very interesting. So I stopped playing AC and EQ and started playing Shadowbane. I kept playing SB even after I came back to the US in 2003.

I started playing City of Heroes in 2004 when my sister told me about it. So I was playing SB and CoH on alternating days. It was fun and enjoyable to have a distration like that. Some where in there I tried to play SWG but that game was to blah for me. I moved from CoH to CoV when it came out.

A guy I worked with, Tenryuu, was playing World of Warcraft since I came out and he told me how much fun it was. So I stopped playing anyother game I had and started playing WoW in 2006. It was then that I found my love of blogging.

So in the end I can say I have been playing MMORPGs for almost around 15 years, that equates to over half of my life. And what a good time it has been!.!

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I have to admit it is hard for me to find a lot of info on Darkfall at work, damn firewall. Although, I have been able to cache a few pages form search engines. For what I have been able to gleam from the information, there is still much debate over what Darkfall will be.

Some of the talk from people interested in the game, question if the game will be released with everything like Adventurine SA claims it will have. I would like to try out the game maybe for a month to see if I would enjoy playing it for a longer period of time.

There are still a few things that have been released that are puzzling to me:

• Unrestricted PVP, but you have to worry about your alignment level. Unrestricted means ‘free of restrictions on conduct’, so I should be able to kill anyone, anytime and anywhere without fear of becoming a “bad guy”. I feel that having alignments would make the game more RvR then pure PvP.
• No levels? I happen to think levels show progress in any game. I do not like when games add in negative combat modifiers to punish a low level toon for trying to attack a higher level toon. Shadowbane and Stargate Worlds have done away with “artificial misses”.
• Skills and abilities are key to any game. I do understand the concept of you become a better swordsman with practice and not “age”. I did not like having to swing a sword 2×10^99 times to increase my sword skill 1 point. I think Shadowbane covered this for PvP games very well. As you level you gain training points, you can spend these points in any manner you please. However, if you try to train yourself to be god at level 1 it’s going to cost you a large amount of coin.

I am still hoping the game does come out and does not become vaporware. I would like to see more PvP oriented games come into the market. I am not talking about DAoC, Warhammer and the like. To me a PvP game is a similar to Shadowbane. Yeah, there are some safe places you can goto but other then that it’s a game of “Dog eat dog”…

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