The Secret World and I

In an effort to ease my WoW burnout I’ve been pretty much only logging on to raid, which off has left a huge hole in my schedule. So decided to give The Secret World a go.

Published by Funcom, it’s described as a ‘modern day’ mmo. Horror based, it has elements from HP Lovecraft, Stephen King (the is an Overlook Motel), as well as conspiracy theories and urban legends being thrown in the mix. You can chose from 3 factions, The Illuminati (they aren’t giant lizards sorry), The Templars and The Dragons. I chose the dragons as I liked the deck combos, but more on that later.

I was a little disappointed with character creation. In someways it’s really detailed, you chose you entire outfit, and there are loads or hairdos and make up choices to chose from, but you can’t customise your height, weight or build, which I liked about the other Funcom title Age of Conan. So you are stuck with a generic skinny and slightly flat chested female character, whereas I like to make my character of a bigger build.

It’s not a newbie friendly game I have to say. It tells you about Ability Points and Skill Points, but not much more than that. The beauty of the game is you continually gain AP and SP, so you can eventually get every skill in the game, but it doesn’t make that clear at first. You build what are called Decks: Weapon and Skill sets that suit your play style. When you start the game you chose your first weapon skills, then you can combine it with a second weapon skill. For example my character uses Blades and Elemental magic, but you can have any combination. And as you gain more points you can build more decks, so you aren’t stuck with one role. Rather than character levels you progress through gear level, or Quality Level. And you can repeat quests aft a set amount of time, so say you have completed all content with one Deck, then you can go back and do it again to build other Decks. This isn’t however explained to you when you start up, or it’s not very clear if it is explained.

Gameplay wise I love it. Rather than buttloads of quests to ‘kill X number of Y mobs’, there are investigation quests which involve puzzles and research, and sabotage missions, which involve stealth and cunning. For example in one quest you have to decipher a message in morse code, so you have to look up how to do that. There are even web pages set up for the game you have to find to get needed info. However I am well aware this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so whilst it attracts me, it probably puts others off.

Graphically it’s very pretty, but it requires damn good hardware to run on anything more than the lowest settings, or so I’ve found. And the background music is very atmospheric, though maybe a tad repetitive after a while. It’s one of the few games recently to creep me out and I feel the BGM has a lot to do with it.

But does it have staying power? Can I see myself continuing to play it once MoP hits? I honestly don’t know. But what the hell, I’m having fun now, and that’s the main thing!

So if you are on the EU servers look out for Elphane.

The Battlechicken July Challenge

As I’m not gaming much at the moment, I figured I’d try and blog about a few other things to pad my blog out a bit.  So after reading a very brave post by Dragonray I decided I would make a post too.  It’s something I have thought about blogging about before but I wasn’t sure if it was too personal for a gaming blog (though I do talk about other stuff a lot too so I guess it would have been ok anyway) and it is quite a personal issue, not as heartrending as Dragonray’s post, but still something that is difficult to write.  So here goes.  My entry to the Battlechicken July Challenge.

Why Does Morrigu Play MMO’s?

It’s kind of sad really.  And not easy to admit.  But I have crippling self-esteem issues.  I find it very hard to interact with people in real life, so I started playing MMO’s.  I’m ‘me’ but not me in online games.  The game offers a safety screen between me and other people, so I don’t have to face them IRL and risk… Whatever it is I am scared of.

A bit of background here.  From the age of 10 I was badly bullied, at the same time I became a carer for my mother who has MS.  I was always an independent child, I liked what I liked and it wasn’t a problem until I left primary school.  I was a tomboy who liked The Beatles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic the Hedgehog.  The summer holiday between primary school and middle school seemed to change everything.  My mum became ill, and a new girl arrived in the village, a girl I didn’t get to meet until school started but who everyone else seemed to have met and become friends with.  For some reason, she took an instant dislike to me, to this day I don’t know why, and that was the beginning of the worst 3 years of my life.  I went from having a good number of friends, a couple of them close, to pretty much no friends at all.  Anyone who spent time with me came in for the same treatment as me, so to them it just wasn’t worth it.  The only person who stuck by me even for a while was G, who was my best friend back then, and is now my fiance, but eventually even he distanced himself from me after rumors were spread about him getting me pregnant.  We were 11 or 12 at the time.  I don’t hold this against him, god knows he feels terrible about it to this day though.  The school did nothing to help me, according to the head teacher there was no such thing as bullying, there was something wrong with me and it was all my fault.  I was sent to special classes, my tormentors got made class principles and bus monitors.  Yay.

So school sucked, and at home I was in charge of caring for mum.  Dad worked full-time, and my brother and sister were grown up and lived 200+ miles away.  So pressure there as well.  Not that I hold it against my mum, it wasn’t her fault, but back then there wasn’t the support for carers there are now, so I was pretty much on my own.

Luckily when I went to high school at 13, the teachers there promised me my bullying would stop.  And within 6 months it had.  They didn’t punish me, they punished the bullies.  But by then the damage was done.

My social skills are pretty bad.  Or I think they are, I’ve been told they are not.  But no matter how close I seem to be to people, I still feel like the outsider, and that I’m not really welcome.  I hate to say it but I even feel that way in my Warcraft guild.  After all, why would anyone want to be friends with me, I have something wrong with me.  I don’t know what that Something is, it’s just there, and people can sense it.  Sometimes I think even G senses it, there are times I am convinced he will turn round and tell me this whole relationship has been a cruel, elaborate joke.  Which doesn’t make sense I know.

I work as a barmaid, which isn’t as hard as you might think for someone like me, but it’s not been that bad.  The person I am behind that bar though?  It’s not the real me, and wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny if that makes sense.  I can chat away about random stuff, but no one, not even the regulars will even get to know the real me.

I have people who I call friends.  I care about them dearly, but I can’t even pick up the phone to call them in case I bother them.

So I play Warcraft, and SWTOR and other games because I can be me without people getting to see or hear the real me, because if they did, they wouldn’t like me any more.  I can pretend, for a while, I am  a Worgen Druid, not a damaged 30 something human.

Scary thing is?  This is a huge improvement on how I was 4 years ago.  I lead a relatively normal life.  I work, I go out, I can even socialize up to a point.  But there is always that nagging doubt that I don’t fit in.

And bloody hell, am I lonely sometimes.

The ‘Right’ Way to Play a Game?

In my quest to relieve my WoW burnout I have been trying to get into Star Wars: The Old Republic again. I rolled a cyborg Bounty Hunter, who looks a little like Lady Gaga:

And yeah, I’m actually having fun.  I’m not sure if I am in it for the long haul, but it’s certainly passing the time.

But a converation in General chat made me think (quite a feat eh? ).  I rolled on an RP server.  I do RP a bit, and tend to find them a nicer, more mature type of server. I don’t create big, detailed character bio’s and stay IC 100% of the time but it is fun to decide what my character is going to be like.  Now as those who have played SWTOR know in every zone there are Heroic areas and quests where you have to group up to complete it.  The latest patch has added a LFG function, but not everyone seems to use it.  And sometimes finding a group for these Heroics seems a little hard.  Which a few days ago triggered a rant from a rather entitled seeming player about it sucked no one wanted to group with him, and if people don’t want to group with him then why do they bother playing an MMO, as the whole idea of the game is to be multiplayer.

Now I will admit to being a bit of a soloer in games.  When it comes to normal content I am happy to run around on my own and do things at my own pace. I am happy to group up for quests etc and I enjoy dungeons and raiding, but I like to be able to do things at my own pace when it comes to levelling.  I don’t believe I am ruining the game by doing it, and at the end of the day I play my £8.99 a month and I will decide how to play my game thanks very much.

But after laying into the soloers in game, the guy then laid into RP’ers.  And a few people joined in, saying that people who would rather RP than do Heroics or Flashpoints should GTFO and stop spoiling the game.  That the only point to SWTOR is to group up.  Well I didn’t agree with that, but ofc I got called names when I tried pointing out that RP was a multiplayer activity just as much as instances were.  But PvP is ok apparently.

What is it with people who seem to think the only way to play a game is THEIR way.  PvE, RP, PvP, it’s all good.  I hate PvP personally (I become a nasty person and yell alot whenever I try), and I spend most of my time PvEing but if a person wants to spend their game time knocking the snot out of other players then that’s their choice.  And I wouldn’t roll on a PvP server and then whine people don’t want to run dungeons all day long with me.

So yeah, Mr McWhiny Pants, if you don’t like people RPing then get off an RP server.

The Many Faces of Morrigu

Not much gaming has been happening at my end.  I’ve been a busy little barmaid, and find that I am too tired to do much more than sleep when I get home!  But I was looking at a couple of recent photo’s taken of me, and was struck by the differences between activities in them, which just shows how odd and varied my life can be sometimes!

The first picture was taken during a caving trip run by Yorkshire Dales Guides down a cave called Long Churn, not far from where I live.  So here is me in a fetching red caving suit and helmet.

It was a little bit of a squeeze

The next photo was taken this weekend.  It was Ingleton 1940′s Weekend, and well, I had to dress up for work.  Never let it be said when Morrigu does something she does a half assed job of it!

I very rarely wear dresses, so to me this is a big deal! And I have to admit I cheated and got a hairdresser to do the hair.

So yeah, just goes to show the weird stuff I fill my time with

 

Mains: Can There Be Only One?

So hey, it’s been a while. Just dusting the blog off, it’s a wee bit dusty!

The burn out isn’t as bad as it was, but that could be because due to my working hours and G’s working hours I’ve not had much time to play. Other than raiding a few times a week I’ve not really logged on at all, which is a shame because I wanted to make the last push to get my lvl 82 hunter to 85 before MoP. Mind you I’m sure I have a while yet.

But during last nights raid I got thinking. Currently I have four characters than are DS geared. I have Petaline, my healing shaman, Morrigu my shadow priest, Moraith my crappier geared death knight, and now Pinkamena, my feral kitty Druid I’m having way too much fun playing right now. In the passed few weeks I’ve taken all of them on raids, and rolled on gear for all of them.

Back when I first started raiding in vanilla the guild I was in had a rule that you had one main character than you would raid with. You could have alts but they would only rarely be allowed to go on an official raid, and if you wanted to change mains the officers had to approve it. This has pretty much been the rule in all guilds I have been in up until I joined Enthusiasm.

Maybe it because there are a lot of altoholics in the guild things seem a lot more fluid than in my previous guilds. I started out with my DK, Moraith as my main, but once FL hit I had lost a bit of interest in her and Morrigu the Spriest became my main. Then one of the healers got healing burn out and I swapped to Petaline, my healer as my main. Now we’ve more healers in guild I’m playing Pinkie. And now I’m worried I’m being selfish…

On thursday we cleared DS. I was on Pinkie, so for last nights raid we did another run with others characters, so I took Peta. I use a main hand/off hand with her rather than a staff, but I love shields. So when the shield dropped from Warhamster (my guilds pet name for him) I rolled and won it even though it was only a small upgrade for me. It was only afterwards I realised that it was a much bigger upgrade for the healing paladin in the group and after a few minutes of persuading him to allow it I traded it over to him.

So I’m having a bit of guilt about rolling on gear for different characters. Is it just me? Do you think you should have one main and ONLY one main that you stick with no matter what? Or doesn’t it matter as long as all raiding members have the right gear?

Burnt Out and Stressed Out

For a while now I’ve not been happy in game. It’s that pre expansion lull, which I’ve had before but personally I think Blizzard released the 4.3 patch too far away from the MoP release. To put it bluntly, I’m pretty damn bored. I have tried keeping my interest alive by levelling alts, but now Pinkamena is 85 I can’t bear the thought of levelling another alt, even my lvl 82 hunter. The only thing I do still enjoy is raiding. Not LFR or random pugs, I like raiding with my guildies. We tend to clear normal DS in one night now, leading to a fun alt run not long ago, but I’d also like to try some heroic modes. But this is where the problem is.

My guild is a ‘mature’ guild. Most of our members are adults with jobs, kids and other responsibilities. And I’m guessing there may be some burn out there too. Which means a lot of raids are being cancelled, with only four or five sign ups. On the occasions we have 7 or 8 sign ups we will pug in a few members, but that tends to mean we don’t try HC modes. I can’t actually remember the last time we had an entirely guild run. And it’s gotten to the point where I’m not sure what to do any more.

Today I spent the afternoon on Pinkie, and took the plunge and after getting enough VP to replace my crappy green trunket, I did LFR for the first time. Both parts. I got the shoulder token to replace the blue ones I was wearing, and a ring, but I ended up losing the staff from Deathwing to a 390+ geared Balance Druid. I guess it was the straw that broke the camels back.

I logged off and just don’t have the will to log back on. There is no raid tonight, so I’m sat at home waiting for pizza and watching antique programs.

Like I say, I don’t know what to do. The options before me are quitting the game til MoP, or trying to find a guild that is raiding. The thing is I love my guild, I love the people in it, but I don’t love the lack of raids. I don’t want to leave but I want to raid! Ack! And if I take a break, what will I do in the mean time? I just can’t get into SW:TOR, not sure I want to spend money of Tera as I keep buying games that I end up not subbing to for more than a few months.

There is always Diablo 3. I signed up for the annual pass so I get it free, and it’s downloading as I type. I have been waiting for it for a long time, and I’ll be able to keep in touch with people via Real ID.

So anyway, I’m far too stressed out to say this is all about a game!

Alive, But No Kicking Today Folks!

I did it! I completed the 12 mile challenge!

Graham and I finished it in 5 hours 22 minutes, and whilst I’m not sure about the fastest and the slowest times, I’m happy with that. I’m not that fit, I’m overweight, I have knee problems and yeah, ok, I spend too much time on World of Warcraft (and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, but that’s a whole new post). But I did it! And no epic mount was involved The walk was over moorland and trails in the Yorkshire Dales so it was steep in places, but it was enjoyable. And the weather was lovely. I even overcame certain hang ups when I had to find a convenient wall to duck behind…

I won’t lie. Yes, I may have over done things. I was fine until the last few miles, and maybe I should have admitted my limits, but I am a stubborn old boot sometimes and wanted to prove I could do this. As a result my knees are swollen, my right hip is painful and I have a blister the size of a 10p piece on my right foot just behind the ties (about a bit less than an inch for non Brit-Landers). I’m hoping a hot bath and an early night will help, as I have work tomorrow. Yeah, I only took one day off. Oops.

G, of course, being skinny and fitter has nary a twinge, but I won’t hate him too much for that.

But screw the pain! I have raised £55 for a good cause (so far), and have proven something to myself (that I’m either strong mentally or I’m batshit, I’m swinging towards the latter).

And I have a medal. Booyah.