…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:
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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!

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.

beau­ti­ful Silvermoon

I have been think­ing long and hard about what art­icles I could pos­sibly write to give this blog a really fab­ulous head­start. Some ideas were dis­carded (“I could write some­thing about ERP! Link­bait, yay!”), some ideas were shelved for a later time (“The many char­ac­ters that became Cleeyah”), and some ideas are already securely in draft form (Won’t tell you, its a sur­prise!). Unfor­tu­nately none of these ideas struck me as mater­ial for lay­ing the found­a­tion of this blog.

I might be over-stressing about this. I pretty sure am. But I want this blog to become some­thing big. Not in the sense of cash­ing in through advert­ising (I will not go down that route) but in the sense of belong­ing to a com­munity of like-minded people who have a blast writ­ing and read­ing about WoW.

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