Confessions of a Relapsed Gamer

Good morning Azeroth! This morning, as I came out of my hut, smelled the fresh Orgrammar air, I felt good. For the first time in weeks I knew everything was okay. My axe was sharp, my mind was clear, and here I was, at home in Azeroth.

Now that I’ve lost some of you due to the quasi-RP-ishness of that last statement, let me explain to everyone what I am talking about, a confession if you will. Well, maybe not a confession, as none of you are priests…eccept maybe pugnatious! 

For the past month, I have been lusting after another game, a game from my past. Not the beauty of the RVR system of Warhammer Online, or the promise of games to come, cough *KOTOR Online* cough. No, my desire wasn’t even for other MMO’s I’ve never played. It was for a game I had played for two years. A game I dedicated alot of time too, and loved the lore, even looked past borked gameplay because of the lore.

I was almost through the temptation, and had all but put it out of my head, when a fellow wow gamer, someone I would consider a friend, brought up the mistress game of my past. We were chatting on skype that day, and he brought up the idea of trying out star wars galaxies. ( I can’t even capitalize letters in the game’s title it hurts so bad!)   This friend, whom will remain unnamed, had downloaded the two week trial of said MMO. I argued about why I wouldn’t go back to galaxies, and had even convinced myself that I had beaten the demons that were pulling me back in.

Then came the kicker. You see, over Skype, I can hear things going on in the background at said friends house….and there it was. It was like sweet necter to my ears, the sound so soothing I drifted back to a time when the hiss of a lightsaber, the roar of a rankor, and the scream of tie engines danced in my ears. The star wars galaxies loading music in the background did me in.

At this point the whole temptation over the past two weeks had come down on me at once. I logged out of wow, and began downloading the free trial. ( I tried getting my old account back, but it was gone, it’s been long enough that it was wiped clean…) As I sat there practically swearing at said friend, I decided that I had to get off of the computer, as it would be an hour or so for the trial to download.

Flash to the next evening. I sat down at my computer, turned on skype, and low and behold, there was my friend, playing galaxies. I had to log in. I put in my account info, and hit the button…There I was, at the character creation page. The background music was so inviting, but something about it felt so wrong. I scanned through the species, the wookies, zabrak’s, twilek’s, rodians, humans, trandoshans, bothans, ithorians, and sulistans….then it hit me… I wasn’t on a familiar Azerothian landscape…I was in a galaxy far far away, and a long time ago…

I rolled up a wokkie Jedi, because lets face it, if I’m gonna roll in galaxies, it’s gonna be a jedi. I get into the game, and get a feel for how the controls are so diffarent from wow. The new game enhancements were coming back to me, and the control schemes flooded back. The game was fun, and for about a week and a half it held my hand, walked me through a galaxy far far away.

One day I was out killing womprats and worgs outside of Tatoine, and it hit me. I began to feel a sense of longing for Azeroth. A sense that I was betraying my friends here in Azeroth. I rode my speeder back to town, and gave the game a salute, and logged out.

The mistress has lost its hold on me. I am free at last. Galaxies is in my past again. looking back, I see that it was just a longing for a lore that I once loved, and still do. The Star Wars universe is huge, immersive, and holds a special place in my heart. The friends I have here in wow, and the community that has risen up out of a game such as wow ( that’s you bloggers) is like no other. The galaxies community was never this great IMO. I never remember seeing as many bloggs about galaxies, and those that were out there, meh, not as good as you guys!!!

So, I want to say, I love you guys, I love Azeroth, and even though I have strayed, Iam back. I’ll be here in Wow for the forseeable future, and galaxies has been deleted from my gaming machine. That evil mistress has no hold on me. Thank you guys, you are my one true game love!

A Friends a Friend Forever...

It IS SOOOOO A Lie!

Dear Blizzard,

We here at For The Horde have often dealt with your lighter side with a feint hard and an audible chuckle.  Your April 1st announcements are often greeted with smiles and jokes, much to our amusement.  That’s because we know they are shenanigans.  We understand that you like to partake in Tomfoolery from time to time. 

But we, here at For The Horde, cannot sit idly by while you attempt to tear the fabric of the space time continuum and utterly destroy the universe as we know it.

Surely, you must understand that this is a mistake:

For we all KNOW that the cake, indeed, IS a lie.  We have known this for some time.  Surely you must realize that this is the next WoW killer.  Although your competitors may not realize it, it will take merely but the promise of pie for your 10 million-ish subscribers to go play another game.  It could be Hello Kitty Island Adventures.  It could be Pokemon Online.  It could be Everquest.  (Well, okay, Everquest may be pushing it, but you get the idea).

Please, Blizzard, we here at For The Horde cannot advocate you taking such a drastic course of action.  You must think of your employees and their wives, and husbands and children.  Think of Tiny Tim, who won’t be getting a new leg this Christmas, all because you promised Cake.  Please Blizzard, heed our warning, do not promise that which we all know is a lie.  Promise the only epic reward that will satisfy all.  Promise Pie.

For The Pie!

 

SO SAY WE ALL!

– Fikkle

For The Horde Pie? For The Pie Horde?

For The Horde Pie?  For the Pie Horde?  We’re not quite sure.  We’re totally lost on how to RP this.  But we know its going to be epic.

A great big CC (Sheep, Sap or Trap, your choice) welcome to PIE who has joined our gang of delinquints in a world of RP goodness.

Welcome aboard Pie!  Just, um, make sure you don’t cross the streams.  I mean, we all know we wouldn’t want total pietonic reversal.  Duh.

 

SO SAY WE ALL!

 

– Fikkle

Blog Truancy and a Special Announcement

There’s a big announcement at the end.  You can skip the noz if you want and just scroll down and read that.

So I’ve kinda been playing blog hookey lately.  I am a truant.  Sylus however, now that he’s back in school, is Mr. Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Goody-Two-Shoes.  He’s been bringing the blog teacher a shiny new apple each and every day.  Hey Sy, you have a little something on your noise.  Its brown.  No, a little higher.  There it is.

Man, my metaphors sure take a turn for the odd.

So what’s been up?  Well, I’ve kinda been running out of topics to blog on, and I’ve kinda been binge-alting again.  A quick summary of the recruit a friend goodness:

2 x Shaman (level 60)
1 x Warlock (level 60)
1 x Paladin (level 64)
1 x Rogue (level 36)
1 x Warrior (level 15)
1 x Priest (level 15)

Right now I’m working on the Rogue / Warrior.  The Rogue is being leveled with my buddy Vrugore’s Warlock, Maadra.  The Warrior is being dual-boxed with the priest, who’s kinda just along for the ride.  In addition to the recruit a friend stuff, I got my third toon to 70 last week, my Resto Druid Anteaus.  And in addition to those toons, I have my 70 Mage and 70 Hunter and a 61 SPriest.  And since I’ve pretty much all but abandoned my Alliance toons, I won’t bother listing them.

And now, FOR THE PIE!*  Err, I mean for the Announcement.

* We at For the Horde do not condone offering Pie as a lie.  All offers of Pie should be genuine and heartfelt, and should be followed through on, unlike offers of cake.  This was not a real offer for Pie.  Had this been a real offer for Pie, we totally would have followed through.  We at For The Horde love Pie in all its greatness, and we would like to take this opportunity to denounce cake.  The cake is a lie.

So, the final reason as to why I haven’t been bloggin much is due to a new project I’ve been working on.  It is still in its infancy stages, but I’m fairly comfortable that most of the details have been worked out to make it live to harddrive.

When I started WoW I was a casual RP’er.  I enjoyed it as a fun addition to an already fun game.  At some point, though, my focus switched to seeing the endgame and leveling and raiding, while the RP aspects of the game got left behind.  With the doldrums that have arisen before WOTLKEE, I began finding that some of the stuff I had wanted to do, I wouldn’t be able to, and so it lost a lot of its fun for me.  That, coupled with some drama in a few guilds we tried had made me give up on raiding.

I decided that I wanted to get back into RP’ing, and blogging about RP stories, something which I had done with Fikkle when I first started.  I thought about simply posting the RP stories here, however, For The Horde hasn’t really ever been an RP-focused blog, and I didn’t want to take away from the general sillyness we tend to lean towards.

So I decided I was going to take it to another site and get started there.  I have since purchased a domain and hosting.  I’m in the process of learning how to set that all up, but that’s another story for another time. 

Lastly, much the same with this blog, I thought our RP site would be much more interesting if there was more than just myself writing for it, but I didn’t necesarily want to limit the site to myself and Sy either.  So I offered it to our close group of friends that game together, and so far, there are going to be five contributors: Myself, Sylus, the infamous Nimroc, the not quite-yet famous Vrugore/Arameth and finally, my baby brother, Khaza.

So here’s a quick run down of what its going to be about:

We’re all going to be contributing stories to an overall saga that will be ongoing throughout the story of WoW.  Each author is going to choose up to four toons to act as main characters, while the plethora of alts that we all have are going to make up our supporting character roles.  The overall story will be based in the lore of wow, but we plan on creating our own lore as well. 

We’ll be giving updates in the next couple of weeks as we work out details and I’ll get links up to the new site once we have it semi-functional (at least).  We’ve got a name for the project, but I’m going to keep that under my hat for now.  So if you enjoy RP and are interested in following allong with some interesting and funny RP stories, stay tuned.

SO SAY WE ALL

Fikkle

Blogging on an iphone?

Hello Azeroth! I’m hoping everyone is staying dry today. I’m sitting here at work bored out of my mind, but luckily I have my iPhone, and imagination to keep me company.

So, I’m neck deep in class work, but loving going back to school! The only thing I wish I had more time for is wow. Although, I have been letting some RP brew In this fat head of mine!

The RP bug looks like it’s getting around. Fikkle and I, along with Nimroc and a few others have an RP project of monumental proportions in the works. I hate just throwing up a teaser for you all, but unfortunatly, that is all I have at the moment!

I plan on busting out a powerpoimt project tonight, that way I have Sunday to play. Wish me luck, I want to go home and play now! Anyway, stay dry out there guys, and if you’re anywhere that is getting beat up by the hurricane, you’re in our thoughts! Stay dry Mr. Randy Deluxe!!

~Uncle Sy
P.S. Here’s a pic of me playing around with the camera on this thing, it’s shweeet!

ARRRRRRRR PEEEEEEEEEEE

Hey everyone! It was such a treat for me last night. I was able to play wow for an ENTIRE evening! I had all of my homework caught up, the wife was busy with real life professional stuff, and so I had the evening to myself. So, i called my boy’s and we had at it on our lvl 60ish toons. We tore up both hellfire citidal instances and then were going to do slave pens….but I’m a wuss and had to go to bed at that point.  So, I logged onto Sylus before bed to get him a few encahnts from fikkle, yes, both tooks fik and I never play anymore. I will be bringing back sy a bit more for a pvp project I’m looking into trying….more of a gimick thing than anything of real value.

Anyway, I’m sitting in org, and over trade chat I see a call for fiery chant, but they have no mats. I open up my bad, and lo and behold, 5 small radiant shards…I got the mats, so I shoot this toon a whisper, “I got your mats, you got my gold?” We did the usual heckling, and then I decided I’d head towards this person to give them fiery. As I’m riding off into the sunset(towards the zeplin to UC) I look at who I’m doing this chant for. It was a lvl 64 warlcok…Now, I’m not poopin on anyone’s playstyle here, but locks and fiery…unless for show, don’t mix. I get to the tower, and the chick starts in with all kinds of RP chat dialogue. I start geeking into it. I pull out my fishing chair, offer her up some goblin gumbo, and settle in for a little rp fun before bed! We chatted about a few things,and then I decided I had to go, so I left party made some statment about how I was needed elsewhere in the shadow’s and vanished, then I proceded to walk around the zep tower before stoning back to shat. It really doesn’t take much to spark an RP moment, and in this case at the most unlikely time! Bed time!

Also, I can’t say anything about this at the moment, but just know, Fikkle is a genius. We may have something cooking up soon, that everyone will hear about afterwards. It’s so hard not to say anything about it, I filled Nimroc in on our scam, and he almost cried in excitment over the phone. He was in the car driving, and almost wrecked. No lie, ask him. Just know, it will be huge, monumental, colosal, over-the-top, AMAZINGBBQPWNLOLCATZAWESOMESAUCE!!!!!!!!

So, stay tuned, we have a deadline, so this has to happen by the end of october….maybe make this a holoween event…hmmmmm, holloween….BOO

~Uncle Sy

Mission Creep in Your Guild

The military is a lot like wow in a lot of ways.  They both have an extremely vibrant social community, different people that fulfill different roles, no matter how much you do in a single day, there is always more to do the next; there is frequent training in both and the guilds (in game) and units (in the military) have distinct structures and often come together to complete specific objectives.  Not to mention that they both use acronyms like they’re candy.  There’s probably more, but that is all I can think of at the moment.   

Okay, so? 

Anyways, the reason I bring this up is something known as mission creep.  According to Wikipedia: 

Mission creep is the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes. The term often implies a certain disapproval of newly adopted goals by the user of the term. Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious attempts, only stopping when a final, often catastrophic, failure occurs. The term was originally applied exclusively to military operations, but has recently been applied to many different fields, mainly the growth of bureaucracies. 

What does that have to do with WoW? 

As I mentioned above, there are many similarities between WoW and the military.  So let’s do a little tweaking and look at the definition from a Warcraft perspective: 

Guild mission creep (GMC) is the expansion of a guild beyond its original goals, often after initial successes. The term often implies a certain disapproval of newly adopted goals by the player using the term. Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to the dangerous path of each success breeding more ambitious goals, only stopping when a final, often catastrophic, guild implosion occurs. The term was originally applied exclusively to military operations, but has recently been applied to many different fields, mainly the growth of guild’s in Warcraft. 

Enough, already!  What the crap are you talking about? 

By now I’m sure you’re sick of reading definitions and if you haven’t given up on this post yet, you’re wondering where I’m going with this.  GMC is something I’ve noticed happen to guilds I’ve been in, as well as having read about on a few other WoW blogs.  One of the best examples of this would be BBB’s former guild, and anyone who read about it would know the background behind it. 

But that happened like forever ago, why are you talking about it now?   

That’s not a valid question, and if you voices in my head don’t shut up, I’ll just go crazy, then where will ya be?   

*Cricket* 

Thank you!  Okay, so where was I?  Right, GMC.  In terms that even my Orc would understand, its simply that the original goals that a guild was founded for, whether it be RP, PvP, Raiding, or just hanging out for fun, has become something of the past, and for any number of reasons, the guild has decided to change its focus. 

The example I talked about with BBB was that his guild began to raid more and more often, and its original focus (I can’t remember exactly what it is at the moment) was lost to more and more of the people in the guild wanting to raid.  Obviously, not everyone did, and BBB decided after much consternation, on and off his blog I’d imagine, decided to leave his guild and move on to a guild of RL friends where he could go back to being much more casual.  Now in that case, I don’t think his old guild imploded, but the change created an affect on the players within the guild and forced them to decide if that was what they wanted. 

That still doesn’t answer the question of why you’re bringing this up now, a gabazillion years after it happened… 

Well its my blog and I’ll do what I want.  And don’t make me go get the [17 Pound Catfish]!  That’s what I thought.  Anyways, a while back, around the same time that I was reading about the GMC with BBB’s guild, Sylus, myself and some of our other friends had transferred our toons to the Cenarion Circle server and started to look for a guild that was doing Kara and Gruuls, which is at about the level we were ready for. 

We joined Salvation, which lasted for a few weeks and saw us leave after the Drama Llama reared its ugly, Chimaera-like head.  That had nothing to do with GMC.  But, we and some others from that guild started a new guild that we planned to start doing Kara with and possibly teaming up with another Guild for Gruuls runs.  That had been our original focus, our Guild Mission, if you will. 

I will not! 

Yes you will, damn you!  Sorry, voices again.  I think I’ve subdued them for the moment.  Did you realize that you can do almost anything with the promise of cake?  True story. 

Anywho, we spent two to three months in this guild, doing Kara a number of times, but we never once had a full ‘guild’ run and quite often we would have to PUG four to five others to actually get a run started.  And if you’ve ever PUG’d Kara, Dax’s rendition of Pugging Kara Blues hits home.  The problem with this was that we hardly ever had more than 5 of the same people running together, which makes it extremely hard to build cohesion.  When we would finish for the night, we’d have to try to re-PUG others the next night to try to finish, which often never happened. 

But how is that the guild’s fault? 

It’s not really, but at the same time it became GMC because when we started the guild we wanted to get into progression.  That never happened and we basically got stuck in the mud.  Ultimately, over another appearance of the Drama Llama we left again.  This time, with the expansion looming closer each day, raiding seemed more and more like too much trouble for some and so we decided to start our own guild.  I ended up as the Guild Leader, and we invited all of our alts.  The purpose of the guild when we started was for levelling alts and hanging out with each other.  Since most of us were friends before the previous guild, we all wanted to stay together.  At the same time, we contacted another guild that was into Gruuls and Mags but was often short on players for their 25-mans.  We agreed to put one or two of our 70s in that guild for those of us who wanted to raid could still do so. 

Okay, so I still fail to see your grand vision of how this all makes sense… 

Bah!  /reportspam.  So I guess the whole point of all of this was to keep in mind what you’re guild was started for.  If you started out as a casual guild of friends that moved into raiding or a raiding guild that couldn’t make any progress, you’ll often find that the guild will fall apart or that some of the people in the guild will decide that its no longer for them.   

If you notice that your guild is beginning to change its focus, or not achieving the goals which you wanted, the best way to avoid it turning into a problem is to talk to the people in the guild.  If everyone wants to start doing something different together, than you can change the focus without a problem.  But ultimately, if different people in the guild want to start doing different things, than it may be best to part ways amicably so that everyone can do what they find fun in the game. 

SO SAY WE ALL. 
 

– Fikkle

Call to blog!

This may seem a bit cheesy, but it’s something that must be done! Fikkle hasn’t posted in days…almost weeks. Now, I understand he’s all off in Hawaii, living it up, chillin on the beach with hotties, sipping cold drinks, and bathing in the sun….nevermind I wouldn’t be posting either…but, I digress. This is a rally cry. I want as many people as possible to create a horde alt on cenarian cirle. Once said Horde alt is at a mailbox(and has 30 copper) send Grimshott (fikkle’s hunter) a message. I really don’t care what you say in it, but it needs to say something about how he is a lazy blogger, and how he needs to get back to work. Heck, tell him you are all sick of sylus, even if he is a sexy devil! I challenge you all, can we get 20 messages to him? 50? 100???? This is almost as good as the tasty cavemold scam way back in the day. (We would send as much tasty cave mold to whoever was gone for an extended period of time, in single stacks of course. This was back when mail mods weren’t on the top of our priority list, so it took forever to clear out all of the mold!

Have fun with this, lets see how bad we can annoy him! BTW, you can say hi to me too if you want too, just drop a line to abadon.

~Sylus

“I summoned this red chunk of something”

How is everyone out there in blogland doing? Great to hear. I’ve had a very eventful vacation, some in Azeroth, some outside of the world. Yesterday was definatly one of those “in Azeroth” moments. I had a buddy over, who is dying to try world of warcraft. He hears me talking about it, and saying how much fun it is, and talking about the lore, it makes him drool. He’s a nerd like that, not that I’m any diffarent really. So, I have a laptop, and my desktop, so I figure we’ll get hi a trial account. Here’s the thing about my buddy, he’s a gaming nerd. He’s never played an mmo, but loves the crap outof oblivion, morrowind, kotor, anything rpg. He dove right in, learned all of the key bindings in minutes! He is having a blast with the game, and even though he isn’t sure he has the time, he wants to get into wow. As you can see from the title, he said a few things that totally blew me away when I heard them. For starters, he rolled a rogue. He’s all stabby happy, and lvoing it, then about 20 minutes into his gaming session, he says, “hey dude, that was cool, I just summoned this red chunk of something, did I earn a power there?” I was flabbergasted, i had no clue what he was talking about, had he just hacked the game, and given a rogue a totally new power???? Nope, midsummer festival buff. It only took me 10 minutes to figure that one out. Sometimes the most innocent things can make my head hurt!

This jsut in, I got a call from Fikkle, he’s at work, Go read Mania’s Arcania, SIGN UP FOR THE WRATH BETA IS OUT TODAY!!!!!!

NO WOW 4 TWO DAYS!!!

So, what do they call that when an alcoholic, or a drug addict, goes a few days without drinking or getting high? You know, where they start to shake, get fidgety, have bad headaches, cold sweats, vomit alot, and crap themselves because they can’t get to the bathroom through all of the spinning going through their heads? Oh yeah, withdrawl. If it was smoking, I’d just do this,

But, fortunatly for my job, I don’t have wow on my work computer!

So, it’s been two days sinse I have had the opportunity to get into the world of warcraft, and I think I may be starting to be addicted…Here are a few of the signs.

1. Last night, when I went to go to bed, something was nagging me in the back of my head, I couldn’t quit put my finger on it, but it was something… So, I tried to forget about it and go to sleep. Then a few minutes later, right when I had gotten to that, not quit awake, but still not asleep stage, it hit me. I had auctions that should have sold over the past 48 hours…I had to get up and check them…

2. After checking said auctions(all of 5 minutes) I decided I was too tired to continue on, and needed to get some rest, afterall, I still have to make an appearance at work the following day, plus the wife thinks I’m crazy. So, back to bed I went.

3. In my wonderful dream filled world known as sleep what did I dream about? You guessed it, World of Warcraft. Was it a grand dream about finally getting exalted with faction X, or finally getting into Black Temple and getting all the way through on our first attempt? No, I’m not that interesting apparently. I was dreaming about farming thorium in winterspring…FREAKING WINTERSPRING!@!@!@! HOW FREAKING BORING AM I???

4. This morning, I get up, check my auctions, even before I get into the shower. Now, that on the other hand is totally normal, I do that every day! After my shower I knew that if I sat down at the computer I would end up staying home until noon and lvling some odd skill here, or some new alt there, so I went to work. Now I want coffee, and wow. Both of which I don’t think I can function without going through some form of withdrawl.

So, last night when I logged in, some guildies were asking about Fikkle. I told them that he was away to the magical world of Iceland and might not have the interwebs. They then proceeded to inform me that he had been on the night before, so apparently all is well with Fikkle, as he has the interwebs, but their are some time zone’s between here and there, so I may just not be lining up with him on the in game schedule. This means he might be making an appearance here and there on these here blogs. So, to you Fikkle, have fun in the land of ice, and see you if I see you in game, and have a safe trip back! If my withdrawl is getting bad from 2 days, and if you aren’t actually playing, yours has to be through the roof bad! Take an aspirin and go lay down brotha!!!

Fighting gaming addictions one day at a time,

~Sy