…I would write a long blo­g­post. But since med­ic­a­tion has reduced me to a creature with the atten­tion span of a gnat, a quick heads-up has to suffice.

• Yes, I still play and enjoy the game. I am cur­rently main­ing my Sith Jug­ger­naut on The Ebon Hawk. I rolled her to play with fam­ily mem­bers in the U.S. of A. Sur­priiiise, they are never on (yes, I do take the dif­fer­ence in time-zones into con­sid­er­a­tion.)
  So now, while my grand-cousins are about level 20, my Syr­i­enna has already ram­paged her way to level 40. And I  become increas­ingly para­noid. Because Quinn.
• The move to Free to Play was a shock, but I still remain cau­tiously optim­istic. If the rumour that lead designer Daniel Erick­son  may be look­ing for a new job turns out to be true, this optim­ism will get ser­i­ous cracks, though. SWTOR for me is all about the stor­ies, and if the game loses its focus on strories…
• After 1.4 I might never again roll an Inquisitor/Consular. I do not PVP in SWTOR, and the 360° knock­back was my OHSHIT but­ton. Why do MMO devs ALWAYS fuck up PVE for the sake of “PVP balance?”

Some of my role­play­ing bud­dies have left SWTOR for Guild Wars 2, and I feel like I have a little bit of a deja vu to the days when every­body and their dog left WoW for Rift (just to crawl silently back a few months later…). But not all of them, and we still work on our guild idea. Lots of fun is had whenever my medication-addled brain comes up with some­thing silly again. Can’t wait to get this shit out of my sys­tem, though.

That’s it for now, just a lit­tel “I am still alive and play­ing post.” Take care of yourselves!

I have moved my char­ac­ters from Trask Ulgo to The Pro­gen­itor (Eurpean RP-PVE, Eng­lish). I was very pos­it­ively sur­prised how fast the move of ALL my char­ac­ters was done — the whole pro­cess was fin­ished by the Bioware team while I was still fid­dling around with the List of Doom.

Big. Fat. Kudos!

Now, all we can do is wait and see how things pan out. I am cur­rently optim­istic that things will work out well. Con­sol­id­at­ing serv­ers at this point of time seems to be a good thing, and face it, the naysay­ers (you know the ones… SWTOR IS DEEEAAAD! DOOOM! FREEE TO PLAAAY! *insert wail­ing and gnash­ing of teeth here*) would have piped up with their proph­es­ies of doom, no mat­ter what. Let them choke on them, is what I say.

I also had a look at other SWTOR blogs to see what their authors had to say about the char­ac­ter trans­fers:
(more…)

When I still played WoW on the server Argent Dawn (EU) there was a web­site that I loved very much: The Argent Archives (which sadly seem to have van­ished from the inter­net). A player could cre­ate pro­files for her char­ac­ters, post screen­shots and stor­ies of her char­ac­ters’ adven­tures; guilds were able to announce role­play­ing events that were open for the pub­lic to par­ti­cip­ate in.

I am very happy to announce that a sim­ilar pro­ject for my SWTOR server Trask Ulgo is in the mak­ing. I have already cre­ated a pro­file for my main, Fereshtar, and will mon­itor the site’s fur­ther development.

A pro­ject like this lives through its par­ti­cip­at­ing mem­bers, so if you are inter­ested, check out Codex Ulgo and start creating!

I really liked the 20 Days of WoW blog­ging thing Saga had star­ted. Liked it so much, that I decided to recre­ate it on this blog as 20 Days of TOR Blog­ging. While I was research­ing for ideas for those 20 days I also found out that Ama at Specced for Drama has my little, humble blog in her blogroll which made me go all “I am not worthy!” *grin*

Sooo, I tent­at­ively pro­pose this post­ing sched­ule for every one who wishes to participate:

Day 01: Repub­lic? Empire? Both? Why?
Day 02: What is your favour­ite TOR race?
Day 03: What is your favour­ite TOR com­pan­ion?
Day 04: To romance or not to romance?
Day 05: Tell us about your guild!
Day 06: What is your favour­ite TOR class?
Day 07: Raid­ing and you
Day 08: PVP and you
Day 09: Are you faith­ful to your main, or do you suf­fer from alt­i­tis?
Day 10: Space­ship com­bat and you
Day 11: Your favour­ite TOR web­sites
Day 12: Be cre­at­ive: an ode to your main!
Day 13: Role­play­ing and you
Day 14: What would you do if you weren’t play­ing TOR?
Day 15: Show us your favour­ite ingame spot
Day 16: Add Ons — Yay or Nay?
Day 17: Are you a pack­rat or do you keep your bank space clean?
Day 18: Tell us about your blog!
Day 19: Tell us about your­self!
Day 20: If you had one MMO wish, what would it be?

Any­one who wishes to par­ti­cip­ate is wel­come and I would be super happy if you could drop a com­ment and a link to your blog. Have fun!

So, while some of my guild­mates are aleady play­ing I reload my Google inbox like a mofo but no luck yet. This gives me time for a few things:

• get psyched up by listen­ing to a met­ric ton of Two Steps from Hell tracks
• adding my ingame Mas­ter as a co-author to this blog. Wel­come, Daken!
• put fin­ish­ing touches on a story I have been writ­ing over the last few days
• get my cat­egor­ies and tags in order again
• pon­der over that server-community-website idea I had
• pon­der over that TOR-blogging site idea I had
• get that 20-Days-of-TOR-blogging thing started

Oh, and I might just put in a few more hours of Skyrim — because once I get access to TOR I won’t be touch­ing Skyrim much, if at all.

Oh, and I just noticed that my permalinks are borked up after the last Word­Press update. Have to repair that, too. Done!

Dear gods, I think I took a wrong turn some­where and ended up in bizarro-land, where Blizzard’s new WoW-Expansion is full of Kung-Fu Pan­das, fea­tures a mini-game that is a shame­less Poke­mon rip-off, and where stat­less armor is hid­den away in their new, hard as fuck, timed instances. Stat­less armor that would be per­fect for, you know, role­play­ers. WHAAAARGARBL!

Oh, and while I am already raging, com­plete with horns, tentacles, fangs and claws? THANK YOU SO MUCH, AMAZON, FOR DELAYING THE DELIVERY OF SW:TOR TO THE 23. OF DECEMBER! I REALLY APPRECIATE HOW YOU TRY TO FORCE ME TO INSTALL ORIGIN ON MY COMPUTER — WHICH WILL HAPPEN WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER!!!

Can somone whack me over the head with a large trout, please? I want to wake up NOW!

On an alto­gether unre­lated note, I have been busy plan­ning out new con­tent for this blog. Like a new series of art­icles where I will go out of my gam­ing com­fort zones. Cleeyah in danger! Watch as our intrepid heroine faces open world pvp! Laugh your­self silly while you watch her raid! *cough* Yeah, some­thing like that.

Clever trans­itions between top­ics are for pussies.

I also am a mem­ber of a guild now! YAY! After it took me forever to come up with a new char­ac­ter for SW:TOR (I didn’t just want to turn Khel­daris into a TOR char­ac­ter, even though the tempta­tion is so eff­ing there. I miss him so much…) I applied for mem­ber­ship with First Know­ledge and got accep­ted. Feels good to have a rp home again.

And now I am going back to rage about pan­das again… RAAAAAR!

Did you know they used you in recruit­ment ads? You were like the human ideal for six months. Then they replaced you with a com­pos­ite image they inven­ted. Guess you didn’t focus test right. The per­fect example of human­ity and they still dumped you. (Jacob Taylor, Mass Effect 2)

EDITED ON WEDNESDAY, 17. AUGUST: Bioware is hold­ing another beauty pageant. This time the col­our of Femshep’s hair is up for the vote. At this moment the red-haired model has a very clear head­start. By now I have given up on Bioware finally get­ting a clue about how to prop­erly rep­res­ent a strong female lead character.

Today I can­celled my pre-order for the N7-Collector’s edi­tion of Mass Effect 3. Because of that blonde impostor that is not Shepard.

I was so look­ing for­ward to a box cover like this… *sigh*

When Bioware first announced that they will fea­ture Fem­shep in trail­ers and on one side of the Collector’s Edi­tion box I was ecstatic. Finally, the many fans of female Shep­ard got recog­nized by the Powers that Be. I really looked for­ward to hold­ing the box with a depic­tion of the default Fem­shep that has been good enough for two games in my greedy little paws.

And then came that beauty-pageant. The guys over at Bioware presen­ted six ver­sions of some young woman in a Shep­ard out­fit to the unwashed masses at face­book and let the mob decide which of those young wan­nabes would be the one to be used in the trailer and on the box. Need­less to say that the gen­eric blonde, blue-eyed and pale-skinned one with too much mas­cara and a less than prac­tical hairdo won.

Com­mander Shep­ard is — accord­ing to the ingame inform­a­tion data­base — 32 years old, a mar­ine, a spectre. She has saved the uni­verse twice. She is a strong, cap­able, and — most import­antly — not sexu­al­ised char­ac­ter. Which, by the way does not mean that she isn’t sexy. It means that she is defined by what she does, and not how she looks or how avail­able she is. Those six nymphs that were presen­ted to the face­book mob were the exact oppos­ite. With them, the only import­ant factor was how attract­ive they are.

The image at the top of this post was cre­ated by Bianso over at devi­antart and it expresses pretty much what I cur­rently think about the fem­shep debacle. Once again, a strong female char­ac­ter got reduced to mere looks. Once again, the mes­sage that got sent out to women is: No mat­ter how cap­able or badass you are, you are noth­ing if you are not pretty.

I wanted Com­mander Shep­ard on my box, not some dolled up pretender.

Another very insight­ful blo­g­post about this whole debacle has been pos­ted by Richard Cob­bett. Finally someone who really gets it.

It seems as if my little circle of rp-buddies grows smal­ler every week. Some of them quit because of real-life issues, some desert for other games. I also noticed that another round of WoW blogs closed shop. The com­munity is def­in­itely shift­ing — and I have to get mov­ing to aquire new rp-partners, and blogs to read. The thing is: at the moment that feels like a bit much of a hassle to me. Real life is hec­tic at the moment, and I DO NOT WANT to leave my com­fort zone.

Not being overly fond of change is one of my many flaws. So, in order to avoid the small upheavals in-game and in the WoW-blogosphere, I tried to sidestep the issue by try­ing out some­thing that for me is pretty, new, and shiny.

I finally bit the bul­let, went out and bought the game I have lus­ted after for a very long time — and which I have denied myself because I don’t nor­mally have some 50€ worth of dis­pos­able money lying around. (Damn you, Media Markt, for hav­ing the Ulti­mate Edi­tion on sale for such a ridi­cil­ously low price! *shakes fist*)

So, yeah, if you were look­ing for me? I was hav­ing fun killing the arch­de­mon in The­das. And roman­cing Zev­ran. That guy is just too pre­cious. I am really sur­prised about how fast the game has sucked me in, because apart from WoW I am not much of a gamer — but Dragon Age just has that irres­ist­ible mix of high drama and some­times hil­ari­ously comic relieve that seems to be my per­sonal fla­vour of crack. I am on my third play­through by now (although I don’t really know if  I will fin­ish the game with a mage). Yes, the story is the usual ‘save the world from big-bad evil and its min­ions’ stick, but I like this vari­ation of the old song and dance.

One reason why the game scored so high for me are the char­ac­ter inter­ac­tions. Another one is that the story con­tains holes. Now, I am not speak­ing of plot holes (although there are one or two in there, as well). I am speak­ing of the kind of holes that get your cre­at­ive juices flow­ing. The kind of holes that just scream to be filled with fanfic.

Yeah, I said it. I also con­fess on trawl­ing the Pit of Voles for good fic­tion for the entirety of last night. I also already have two or three stor­ies in the works. Don’t know if they will ever reach the stage of pub­lishab­il­ity (yes, that’s a word!) because the time when I reg­u­larly wrote fan­fic­tion is a loooong time ago, and I my skills at spin­ning a good yarn have become a bit rusty. But the heck, it is fun. I am enjoy­ing it at the moment — in fact I enjoy it more than log­ging into WoW and see­ing that another round of my rp-buddies have left for greener pastures.

I am not about to quit WoW, though. The game still pulls me in whenever I log in. I am just tak­ing a sort of vaca­tion. I show up for planned and sched­uled rp-events. I don’t let my bud­dies down — but I also told them that I won’t be show­ing my face very often at the moment. My char­ac­ters are sent on sol­it­ary excur­sions and secret mis­sions to explain my absences. But, as good old Arnie has said: I’ll be back.

I have a lot of very fond memor­ies of play­ing WoW but if I had to decide which one was the best I would say that it was the day when my female Belf-pally Sinthara died. Not because she died, but because of the way she died. But I am get­ting ahead of myself a little. Let’s start at the begin­ning, ok?

Sinthara was Kheldaris’s sis­ter, very holie-than-thou, haughty, con­des­cend­ing. I think Khel was the only char­ac­ter on the whole server who actu­ally kinda liked her — because I also played Khel which meant that the two never really had a chance to clash. He always defen­ded her against other player’s rants, while she wouldn’t tire to rant about what a dis­grace her little brother was in her eyes. Charm­ing, right? In short, with her I made one of the car­dinal sins of role­play­ing: I cre­ated a char­ac­ter that every­one hated. She was stuck, and play­ing her wasn’t a lot of fun. I was ready to just go and delete her when I found a post on the offi­cial realm for­ums that a group of troll play­ers were look­ing for a vic­tim. I lit­er­ally pounced on that oppor­tun­ity because it was a way to explain her sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance from the server.

I con­tac­ted the GM of the troll-guild and said that I had a dis­pos­able belf-pally and they were pretty happy. The even­ing prior to the event we “met” through par­tychat and hammered out the rules for it. I made clear that I wouldn’t tol­er­ate any form of sexual viol­ence (which they weren’t plan­ning to inflict any­way), and apart from that they could go wild. The com­mu­nic­a­tion prior and dur­ing the event gave me a really good feel­ing about play­ing out some­thing that was ripe with pit­falls. The whole group was corteous, and kept up a steady stream of com­mu­nic­a­tion dur­ing the grisly event: the hunt, and cap­ture. The tor­ture, inter­rog­a­tion and final behead­ing. It was a glor­i­ously bloody mess, one of the most elec­tri­fiy­ing rp-sessions I ever had.

*raises a glass of blood-red wine and salutes the most vicious troll guild Die Aldor ever had*

I really can’t stress enough how import­ant the com­mu­nic­a­tion before and through­out the event was. It reas­sured me that there weren’t things going to hap­pen which would make me uncom­fort­able. It helped my co-players to gauge how far they could go with the viol­ence, and how vividly they could describe what happened. It was also fun, because they were a pretty cool gang with a very dry sense of humour. Loos­ing these guys was one of the nails in the coffin of my former main-rp-server. It was also import­ant because I could reas­sure them that the death of my char­ac­ter was okay with  me (they had had some trouble with other play­ers who had got­ten cold feet at the last moment).

I remem­ber that I rather grudgingly agreed to try out this WoW  thing. I did not expect that it would suck me in like it did — I guess that’s an exper­i­ence a lot of people went through.

My first MMO I ever played was Guild Wars, basic­ally because I got the boxes cheap and there were no addi­tional costs involved. The monthly fees for play­ing WoW kept me away for a very long time. I dearly loved Guild Wars, too. Prior to GW the only time I had exper­i­ences multi-player gam­ing was back in the days when I dabbled a little with Diablo II — and it wasn’t an exper­i­ence that hooked me. I thought it was rather stress­ful. Guild Wars on the other hand was much more relax­ing. Don’t ask me why, maybe it was the people I met there.

The only thing that vexed me with Guild Wars was that all my real-life friends played WoW and wouldn’t come over to play GW with me. Instead they would keep badger­ing me to try out their game. For me this was a frus­trat­ing situ­ation because I didn’t want to leave GW, I had already inves­ted so much into this game: the boxes, the time, and met some very nice people. The most import­ant deterrence, though, was that I wasn’t will­ing to fork over cash on a montly basis for a game I already had payed for. *harumph*

So, I was sit­ting in my corner, being stub­born, and my friends sat in that other corner and were stub­born, too. It didn’t look like we would be online gam­ing together any­time soon. And then my birth­day rolled around.

The bas­tards had put their money together and bought me the WoW box, and gam­ing time cards for a full year. Hon­estly, with that type of friends, who needs enemies

So, I spent a big part of that day in August 2006 installing the game — all the while my friends who had come to my place secretly held their breaths that my com­puter would not simply show them the fin­ger. It didn’t.

And then I had to choose what kind of char­ac­ter I wanted to play. I felt like being mis­chie­ve­ous, and decided to roll an alli­ance toon much to the hor­ror of my friends who all had horde char­ac­ters. My logic was that I had made the step to try out their game, so they could make the step to try out the other fac­tion. To me it soun­ded only fair, and we would all be low-level char­ac­ters and could level together. My first ever char­ac­ter was a Night Elf rogue on Arygos. She was awe­some, tall, not a pushover, belonged to a race of kick­ass women.… wait, what did she just do? Was that a bounce? *face­palm* Thank you Bliz­zard. How could you?!

The first thing that really struck me was how col­our­ful WoW was. To me it seemed as if the world­build­ers had been on ser­i­ous crack. Finally enter­ing gloomy Dark­shore almost felt like a relieve to my eyes.

If I remem­ber cor­rectly I man­aged to level this first toon up to level 16 before real­iz­ing that I didn’t like play­ing a rogue (back then). The whole gather combo points to unleash them with a fin­isher thing was new to me and I didn’t like it very much. So I went and rolled a cute gnome war­lock. Her name was Min­malkin and she was the first toon I man­aged to level to level-cap — it just took me almost two years. I never was and never will be a pro gamer.

Shortly after the launch of Burn­ing Cru­sade one of my friends asked me if I wanted to join him and his guild on a roleply­ing server. They had just cre­ated an all Belf rp-guild. How could I res­ist? Belves and role­play­ing!!! I was so much in love with that. And so Khel­daris was born, hunter, con-artist, cat-lover, omni­sexual and a foodie.

I still go and play Guild Wars every now and then, at least in the gam­ing world, you can never really for­get your first love.