The amount of spam that hits this site on a daily basis is pretty stag­ger­ing and annoyed me very much — but I grit my teeth and dealt with it because I didn’t want to make the few read­ers I have suf­fer through the making-your-eyes-bleed atro­cit­ies called CAPTCHA. Now I have found an altern­at­ive which not only doesn’t make your eyes bleed, it is also fun.

You want to make a com­ment on my site? You have to play a little game. Easy as that. Go on, try it out!

EDIT: How you can get cool spam pro­tec­tion, too:

Go to this web­site: http://areyouahuman.com/ and register for an account. The basic func­tion­al­ity is free. If your blog runs on Word­Press or Drupal you can down­load a plug-in that does the heavy lift­ing for you. Also, their instruc­tions are easy to fol­low.
There are also plug-ins for phpBB mes­sage boards, Invi­sion Power boards, and vbulletin.

… and all those other serv­ers that get closed down tomor­row. Yes, tomor­row. I am going to take Bioware’s announce­ment as an oppor­tun­ity to throw some facts about the server con­sol­id­a­tion into your face. Duck if you eas­ily bruise.

• Free char­ac­ter trans­fer is now closed
• Char­ac­ters will be moved auto­mat­ic­ally, regard­less of the play­ers sub­scrip­tion status. No char­ac­ter will be deleted.
• If your char­ac­ters have been moved to new serv­ers, you can find where they are now by click­ing on the column of the server select screen hand­ily named “char­ac­ters.” This sorts the server list so that serv­ers on which you have one or more char­ac­ters will be lis­ted on top.
• The char­ac­ter limit per sever will be raised to twelve *yay*
• Again, none of our cur­rently exist­ing char­ac­ters will be deleted. If you want to cre­ate a new char­ac­ter on a server where you already have exceeded the char­ac­ter limit, though, you have to clear one char­ac­ter slot. Which basic­ally boils down to delete enough char­ac­ters until you have only eleven left. THEN you can cre­ate a new one.
• Leg­acy names are NOT unique any­more — and every­one will have the oppor­tun­ity to rename her leg­acy once for free. I craft­ily deduce from this that Legacy-renaming will be one of the fea­tures we will be able to buy with Car­tel Coins.
• You might have to rename your trans­ferred char­ac­ters.  *puts on earmuffs*
• Guilds with names that already exist on des­tin­a­tion serv­ers will be renamed to some­thing like: old-guildname@old-servername. *shud­der* No, hon­estly, I’d rather have to rename my guild than run around with that kind of mon­stros­ity over my character’s head. How good that a  renam­ing but­ton will be avail­able through the guild man­age­ment win­dow. Let’s all look for­ward to incred­ibly unima­gin­at­ive guild­names spelled out with the most ridicu­lous  com­bin­a­tion of alt-codes…
• Legacies of dif­fer­ent serv­ers will be com­bined. You will not lose any earned leg­acy traits or perks.

This final move will basic­ally be of interest to those only who stayed on the now locked ori­gin serv­ers. Every one who already went through the char­ac­ter trans­fer pro­cess with all of her char­ac­ters will have to make some room for the new­comers, bake some wel­come cook­ies, and put on their best pair of undies. That’s it.

After hav­ing a look at the server con­sol­id­atin mat­rix (which is linked-to on this page) I see that Bioware is con­sol­id­at­ing the serv­ers even fur­ther. The Fat­man, for instance, has been a des­tin­a­tion server dur­ing the free-character trans­fer pro­cess, and will now be fol­ded into Proph­ecy of the Five. So, if you were unlucky the first time around and had to rename your char­ac­ter, you might have to rename it AGAIN. Ouch.

The latest step in Bioware’s pro­cess of server con­sol­id­a­tion has gone online: A High Pop­u­la­tion Test Server. If you have char­ac­ters on East Coast serv­ers, they got copied over auto­mat­ic­ally. Since my little Sith War­rior actu­ally resides on the Ebon Hawk, she is one of the lucky ones.

I am curi­ous. If you leave me alone in a room with a but­ton in front of me, the door hasn’t fin­ished clos­ing before I pushed that but­ton. So, I hopped onto that server. The first thing that greets you is a pop-up, which is obvi­ously meant for those folks who’s char­ac­ters will be auto­mat­ic­ally trans­ferred to des­tin­a­tion serv­ers, once the now locked ori­gin serv­ers are closed down. It basic­ally tells them not to freak out and that they might have to rename their char­ac­ters. I fore­see a lot of whining.

But that isn’t why I write this post. I write this post because there was one other thing that caught my eye:

I don’t know if this applies only to the test server, or if this means that once the con­sol­id­a­tion pro­cess is com­pleted, the char­ac­ter limit per server will be raised to twelve. I hope for the latter.

There is also good news for all people who fear they are going to lose char­ac­ters to the con­sol­id­a­tion process:

None of your char­ac­ters will be deleted. You will be able to use all of them when we merge char­ac­ters from ori­gin serv­ers onto cur­rent des­tin­a­tion serv­ers (with new high pop­u­la­tion tech). How­ever, in order to cre­ate a new char­ac­ter, you will have to free up one of your char­ac­ter slots.  (Joveth Gonza­lez)

…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 swear, the world is con­spir­ing against me to keep me away from my favour­ite games. First, there was this massive influ­enza out­break among my col­legues which meant double shifts for those of us who were not among its vic­tims. Then I caught the virus myself. Good times. Not.

And now, that I finally got rid of the flu? I might get pro­moted at work. Which means sev­eral weeks of train­ing for the new pos­i­tion. Right when ME3 hits.

WHARGABL!

I am not com­plain­ing about the pro­mo­tion. It means more money and more sane work hours. The tim­ing could have been just a tad bet­ter. Just say­ing… UNIVERSE, Y U HATE ME?!

In other, totally not work-related news: I hit a snag with my IA. That class quest around level 32 where you fight the big bad? Uh, yeah, I haven’t been able to beat that. I am try­ing for four days now, but no dice. I’ll give myself another four days and if I can­not man­age that fight in that time? I’ll rer­oll the agent, because THERE IS AN EFFING POSSIBILITY TO SKIP THAT FIGHT THAT I DIDN’T KNOW EXISTED.…. RARRGH!

The Old Republic

Guess what I just pre-ordered? Muahahahaha!

After real­ising that I am pretty much burned out on WoW (yes, I finally unin­stalled the game) after I used up the gif­ted week of free game-time, and after learn­ing that the release date for Star Wars — The Old Repub­lic is the 22. of Decem­ber, I thought: WHY NOT?! The money is already squir­relled away on my credit-card account, so that is one head­ache avoided.

Add to that the fact that the first time in years I will not have to work dur­ing thelast week of the year and you get a very, very excited little Cleeyah pos­it­ively boun­cing off the walls at the moment. Now, I just have to gently break it to my fam­ily that I will not spend a lot of time with them over X-Mas…

For this blog, this means that the prob­ab­il­ity of new role­play­ing art­icles is cur­rently very high. I even con­sider con­tinu­ing the 20 Days of… series of art­icles — just with TOR instead of WoW.

I am play­ing throug KOTOR at the moment (a very cheap grab from Steam) and have a lot of fun. A little bit unex­pec­ted since I have always been a bit more of a Startrek girl than a Star Wars fan, but meh.

So which side will I be tak­ing? Jedi? Sith? Aaahh, decisions! I am so bad at those! (Insert oblig­at­ory Come to the Dark Side — We have cook­ies joke here…)And what kind of char­ac­ter will I cre­ate? Seems as if I have my char­ac­ter cre­ation work cut out for me.

Do.WANT!

I do want this for my huntery gob­lin girl.

Yes, that means that I am back play­ing WoW again. At least for this month. I just want to see if the bug bites me again. If not I will free pre­cious hard­disk space.

It is really inter­est­ing to see how much a server can change dur­ing a few months’ worth of absence. Or a class, at that. I was shocked to see pet-happiness gone. Not that I was overly fond of this, not that it played any role for my hunter. It just felt odd.

And I so did not have to retrain where all my key­bind­ings are… >.>;

I just hope that attack-critter makes the same noise as my shale spider when she goes for her vic­tim… *screeeeeee*

I feel like an eff­ing hypo­crite right now, but I think I have to fess up. I haven’t exten­ded my WoW-subscription and it ran out yes­ter­day. All the storylines of my rp-characters have been neatly resolved, and I have parked them in their “retire­ment” spots on Azeroth. Right now, it looks like I will be away from WoW, at least for some two or three months. Another fan­dom has swal­lowed me whole, and I simply don’t have the drive to keep up play­ing WoW at the moment. Log­ging in feels like a chore — and it shouldn’t.

I have hon­estly no idea what I am going to do with the blog. I really don’t want to give up blog­ging. Maybe I’ll extend the focus to include fan­fic­tion. That way I can keep all my stuff neatly in one place. I am really sorry about this.

After leav­ing com­ments on sev­eral blogs about RIFT and why I won’t be giv­ing TRION my hard earned cash, I thought I might elab­or­ate on these posts on my own blog. Because I still feel a bit sore after the dis­a­point­ing beta-experiences.

See, I was ini­tially pretty excited about the game. It soun­ded like a lot of fun and people who were already play­ing in the beta weren’t get­ting tired telling me just how awe­some it is. So I went and made a player account in the hopes to get a beta-invite. Which — much to my sur­prise — came pretty fast.

I was impressed by the char­ac­ter gen­er­a­tion. I really wish WoW would offer these kind of customization.

I spent my first RIFT-evening with two friends on Argent, a role­play­ing server. That there were role­play­ing serv­ers seemed like a good sign. This first even­ing I really had a blast play­ing with my two friends. We were slowly quest­ing our way through the first zone after the starter area. The quests them­selves were run-of-the-mill, kill-ten-rats type quests. A first minor dis­ap­point­ment. We hoped that the quest qual­ity would improve at higher levels. The rifts them­selves were a lot of fun in the begin­ning but as the days passed they quickly lost their appeal, until at the end of my beta-experience I thought them down­right annoy­ing. Espe­cially at times when I had to turn in quests, the turn-in area was over­run by Rift-creatures, and my calls for help only got me a unsym­path­etic “Do it your­self, noob.” Obvi­ously I wasn’t the only one who got tired of rifts fast.

Which brings me to the com­munity aspect of the RIFT beta — which was pretty bad: the people I encountered. When I wasn’t able to play with friends, which happened often as they were pretty tied up in work­stuff at that time, I was going through a little hell. Early on I have made the mis­take of telling in chat that I did not hate WoW, but liked both. WoW a little bet­ter because that was where I had my role­play­ing bud­dies. Which was obvi­ously the wrong thing to say.

The rabid mob imme­di­at­ley tried to tear me sev­eral new ori­fices for dar­ing to like WoW. This wasn’t a one time exper­i­ence but happened on a reg­u­lar basis. Whenever the chat turned to com­par­ing the two games I would pipe up with my view. I don’t let myself be silenced in real life, so why should I start to let myself get silenced in a game. The reac­tions ranged from mild “lol” to excess­ively abus­ive attacks. RIFT seemed to bring quite a host of  fan­at­ics to the yard.¹

Group­ing brought a few bad exper­i­ences as well. Whenever I would tell them to please not abuse the word rape, not fling around the word gay in a derog­at­ory man­ner, I would get chewed out. When I let slip that I am a woman I got chewed out (“lol, girls suck at play­ing games, gtfo) and creepy attempts at flirt­ing were made (Im sur u got big boobs. I like big boobs).  Appeal­ing to the GMs because of the har­rass­ment didn’t help. Quite con­trary, when I repor­ted a bunch of play­ers because of rp grief­ing I got told by a GM to not bother them with “rp crap” because they had “more import­ant stuff to do.” Yes, that happened on a rp server. What also happened was that I was told by other play­ers that “freaks” like me “should be locked in a house and the house then should be burned over my head.” Lovely.

And all the while TRIO’N’s GMs did noth­ing to help. Not ingame, and not on the forum the one time I went there and opened a thread where I com­plained about the abuse and GM inactiv­ity. The thread quickly became a hate-fest, where I was told to “go back to WoW, faggot.”

And that is exactly what I did. The thread, by the way, was gone after half an hour. Maybe a mod deleted it.

My RIFT exper­i­ence could be sub­sumed as “an under­whelm­ing but not bad game exper­i­ence that was ‘spiced up’ by the nas­ti­est bunch of aggress­ive asshats I have encountered in a long while. I think, dear read­ers, you can under­stand why I am not too keen on throw­ing money in TRION’s direction.

I am look­ing for­ward to Guild Wars 2, though.

[EDIT]: Oh my, I totally for­got about the women’s armor. The armor for women in the game doesn’t appeal to me, because it is of the plate-thong vari­ety. Which is a big put-off for me. My char­ac­ters are resur­rec­ted, battle-hardened cham­pi­ons. Why would they run around in armor that is purely cos­metic and does noth­ing to pro­tect them? TRION, as most MMORPG com­pan­ies, caters to the “male, pre-pubescent voyeur” cus­tomer. A relic of the past, because — at least in WoW — the player base is much more fem­in­ine and diversified.

As a woman, and a role­player I feel slightly insul­ted by being stuck with skin reveal­ing armor. If the developers can­not be arsed to design altern­at­ive, decent armor, or give the play­ers the choice between sens­ible and sexy armor for both genders, they do not deserve my money.