Yeah, I like Talking Heads.
I’ve been an avid online gamer since the heady days of when Ultima Online first started. Actually, I need to go further back.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…we accessed the internet with a modem, and not a DSL modem. No, we actually heard the dubstep-y noise from a small box that we had connected to the phone line, that used our normal home phone number, to dial into Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS for short. Those BBS’s were run by other avid tech nerds for a variety of different things. You could literally use it as a bulletin board system, posting stuff for others to see and reply to other’s posts. Most of us used it for the earliest of MMO gaming. There was Barren Realms Elite, BRE, there was Falcon’s Eye, FE, and a handful of other games. You had a small amount of turns, used to increase your virtual wealth and landscape, to wage war against others, to build and develop your lands, and of course shit talk to/with those you played with. The bigger BBS’s would play against other BBS’s, spawning huge tournament realms where almost hundreds of BBS teams would compete against each other for virtual glory, all at the blazing speed of a 56kb/sec modem speed. Back then, we crawled. We fucking crawled, backwards, in the dark, no lights, and we loved it. Today, you kids instantly teleport through the entire known universe compared to how slow our internet was back then.
Yeah, I go way back. You know, to the 80’s.
Fast forward, and I was one of those “kids” that grew up playing those Blizzard SNES games like Rock N Roll Racing and Lost Vikings. I was the kid that got my entire group of high school nerd friends into Warcraft and Warcraft II. We played the original Mech Warrior DOS game, we looked down on the “old guys” that were hooked on Mysts. And those early versions of Windows, we customized all the settings, sounds, layouts, colors, schemes, in much the same way that others would trick out their cars and take it “racing” to show off.
But you aren’t here for a history lesson. You’ve probably already read Ready Player One.
MMO’s, if you are reading this, that’s your interest. Maybe it isn’t, maybe you just stumbled here while checking out pictures of cats and Reddit posts. But this place, my domain, my world, is about MMO’s, and 99.9% of the time, it’s about WoW. Well really all of this is about me, my ideas, but the setting is WoW.
You will get a history lesson anyways. To really understand where any of us are “right now”, we have to know and understand where we came from.
So, MMO list, Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call I & II, Earth and Beyond (don’t cringe, it was short, but sweet, it gave us a taste of space MMO’s), DAoC, EQ I & II, Eve, CoX (Heroes, and then later Villains), WoW, the Diablo’s (I, II, III, and yes I’m considering them MMO’s when others won’t), Age of Conan, FF XI, Guild Wars I & II, Lineage, LotR, Matrix Online, Rift, Shadowbane, SWTOR and SWG, Vanguard, Planetside I & II.
For me though, the bigs, UO, EQ, DAoC, CoV, and WoW.
Ultima Online was my first dip into sandbox online play. And for my close circle of friends, we were hooked. She was my high school sweetheart, that I took with me into my college years. If there was ever a game where I could say I started out as a TOTAL newb, that would be the game. Shit, when I first started, I had no idea what “stats” were, what a “spec” was or a “build”. Macros? Key binds? The fuck language are you speaking? I’m too busy trying to figure out how to open up my inventory and walk around, much less actually realize how to raise skills, or the fact that there was a finite amount of skill points you could even earn in that game. By the time I left that game, shortly after it went “2.5 D”, I was a vet. I had “alts”, melee and caster toons, crafters, houses and boats, bank alts full of crap, start and disbanded guilds, and been to the far reaches of the game world. I dipped into the lore (I played all the old NES/SNES Ultima games already), I pvp’d, I raided. And I got bored, but it took years.
Then EQ came along. It was one of those things, like when you are dating one person, but this terribly enchanting other person comes along, and they consume your waking thoughts and dreams at night. EQ was 3D. It had “weight”. And again, all of us were thrown into the “newb” category all over again. But real guilds formed, controlled servers. It’s a concept that people getting into MMO’s can’t comprehend today. Imagine wanting to kill something, some rare creature with even more rare loot, but you can’t, because some people from a guild are “camping” it. And all the other rare spawns. And they have a team of max level players going after the real raid content. Before player customizable UI’s, when we all had no idea what was going on, but we managed to slog our way through the challenges the game developers created anyway. You had politics on a lot of the servers. There were consequences to being a fuck-tard to the other players. It was the fantasy-wild-fucking-west, and there we no cops, just everyone forming their own militias. Don’t step into the wrong town, you won’t like it.
Dark Age of Camelot then hits the world. Entire guilds from EQ moved to it. It was the “new” new frontier. There becomes a very, VERY, noticeable divide between “casuals” and “hardcore” players. I remember it fondly as the first game I got burned out before ever even seeing an expansion. I quit my first guild from EQ during that game.
I wandered the gaming waste land, playing single player, strategy, RTS, and FPS games. WoW and City of Heroes both come up around the same time in beta. I played both, well, I played WoW first. Then City of Heroes came out, and I moved to it. I’m a big comic book fan, so I was instantly hooked. I played it casually, but I played it every day. That may not sound like casual to some people, but to those that know what it takes to be “hardcore” in an MMO, you know the difference. If you don’t understand the difference, ask a friend, it’s a big difference. You could spend the exact same amount of time, maybe even more in-game time than a hardcore, yet never actually be one. I’ll elaborate later.
I took a break from CoH, went back to WoW, but then City of Villains hits. Being good has a lot of merit and fun to it. But from how I looked at CoV, like it was a living breathing story, if you can write an amazing villain, then you have an amazing story. My mind breathed in great stories involving great villains, and I knew how to weave that kind of story. Yeah, I played CoX on their RP server, fuck you if you think it’s dumb. But this is an MMO about comic book characters. If you aren’t pretty RP about it, you were playing the wrong game. This was my first time in RP PvP. I was hooked on the forums, with my Villain group and with my server. My villain group was good, one of the best of all time. X-Patriots. I made people want to play the same class I played after watching me fight other people, heroes and villains.
But eventually, my love of Blizzard pulled me into WoW. I got back into it late in BC, and had to take a break during Wrath because I got married and moved to a different state. I married the most perfect woman in the world. We loved the same movies, we loved to go to bars and play poker, we loved the same music, we even loved gaming. She’s better at Halo than I am. I got her hooked on WoW, and she’s a co-raid leader with me in WoW. And she loves to cook. Yeah, suck it, she loves to cook and play WoW with me. Fucking JACKPOT!
Cataclysm hits, and just before Firelands patch comes out, we decide we really want to get into raiding. We spend days, weeks, looking for a guild to join. We looked at websites, talked to people in game, debated back and forth what guilds and players looked like fun. We made some choices, some good and some bad. We ended up flipping from Alliance to Horde, our own guild and raid team. Growing pains. We loved playing, but we weren’t the best, but we dreamed about being the best.
MoP comes out, and we had very lofty dreams about being the best team on the server. Massive personnel issues plague us, and we have to recruit almost constantly through the first couple months of the expansion. Around November though, close to December, we pull ahead from a lot of other guilds, and in December we actually pull ahead of all the horde guilds. There are still some Alliance guilds that have us out paced. We’re about to get into tier 15, and right now as I am writing this up, we have a solid lead on the horde side as far as heroic raiding progression goes, and we really aren’t that far behind the alliance guys.
I’m the raid leader, the guy making the call during every pull, working the math before every boss, planning, watching, reading, writing, bugging my wife who hates coming up with strats, bugging my guild leader who loves coming up with strats, and then hoping I’m explaining everything to my team so we get kills. We’re pretty good at it now, and we have something to prove. I, have something to prove. In real life, I may not be the smartest, the richest, the fastest, or the strongest. But in WoW, in my world, I am all those things, and more. I command a team that has few peers. Once again, the virtual world is the wild-wild-west for us, and we ride in, guns fucking blazing, and no one stops us. It’s our town.
Saichotick, enhancement shaman, Remix, Eldre’thalas-US.
(it’s pronounced “psychotic”)
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