retirement

About 18 months or so ago, I posted about my experience playing Age of Conan. At that time I'd played for just over a year, and this week will see me finish playing after just a shade over 2 and a half years of being subscribed.

When I posted last time, I had fairly recently joined my third guild, Primal Fury. Not long after posting, PF almost fell apart, as a number of the senior players in the guild lost interest and left to play other games. I was one of a few players, and along with Vic, I'd like to think one of the main ones, who stepped up and rebuilt the guild, going back to lower level raids and introducing new players until we were able to get back to where we had been. It took a few months, but PF became a very powerful guild. At our peak, we were running 2 raids in parallel through tier 2, and we were the first guild on the server to craft an Ibis blade.

About a year ago, the guild had begun to fade slightly, focussing more on PvP (which doesn't interest me) and less on PvE (which does), and the game's expansion pack was released. I wasn't excited by the prospect of playing the xpac on a PvP server, so I rolled an assassin on the PvE server (Wiccana), and joined the Third Time Lucky guild, which my friend Misaki played with. I was fortunate that I came in playing a class in which TTL were undermanned, and I was able to quickly get gear and become a regular raider. I raided with TTL as we progressed through T3, where they have now downed Thoth-Amon.

I wasn't there for that kill, though. My interest in the game started fading about 3 months ago, and in the last 2 months I've probably only played 3 or 4 times. Given that, I've cancelled my subscription. It was difficult to do, simply because there are a lot of people in the game whose company I have enjoyed for a long time, some of them, like Misaki, going back more than 2 years. Its been very interesting to see just how solid a social group can be formed over a voice chat server, when everyone is working together to achieve a collective aim. I hope I'll be able to meet up with some of the people I've played with if I play another online game.

For now, though, "serious" gaming has somewhat lost its appeal, and I'm devoting more of my time to some activities that I've let lapse in recent years, particularly books and movies.

A year in the life

It has now been a year and two weeks since I started playing Age of Conan. I don't think I've mentioned it here before. Although I have put a lot of time into the game, I suspect its not something most of my readers would care about.

I started playing with Paul and Julie - the choice to play on a PvP (player versus player) server - Bloodspire - rather than a PvE (player versus environment) server was theirs. Left to my own devices, I likely would have chosen PvE, although I don't really regret the decision much. Ali joined us for a very short while, but she found the personalities of PvP a little hard to bear - understandable, there were then, and there remain, a lot of players who are immature in their communications and in the way they play the game.

My main toon (and still my only toon to reach the level cap) is Danlara, a Cimmerian guardian. I chose to play a tank because my previous MMO experience (in WoW) had been as a healer, so I thought I would try the other essential (in my opinion) group PvE role. My only other toon is a (as of last night) level 79 barbarian named Rokito.

The thing I have enjoyed most about the game has been the people I have played with. We started with our own guild, Hashhashin (or something like that), which was fine while we were levelling up our toons to the level cap (80). When we approached the cap, we merged into a guild called Wake of Fury, with a bunch of other (mainly) Australians. WoF dipped their toes into raiding in late October, and despite not really having the numbers, it went well.

I had a break over Christmas, and when I came back near the end of January, I found that Wake of Fury was doing weekend raids with a US guild called Immortal. I enjoyed these, and started having a significant role in the raids as one of the main tanks. Near the end of February, guilds started abandoning the server we were on because of falling population, in favour of the more populated Tyrrany and Cimmeria servers. Immortal was one of the last to leave, and Wake of Fury decided to follow them to Cimmeria, rather than be left as the only guild on Bloodspire.

When we arrived on Cimmeria, we merged with Immortal to briefly form Immortal Fury, which quickly reverted to the name Immortal. I became their main tank (with first dibs on guardian gear), and we were raiding tier 1 fairly comfortably. One weekend, though, Immortal quite suddenly fell apart, and the oceanic members (including those of us that had come from WoF) all moved across to the main Oceanic guild on Cimmeria, Primal Fury.

Primal Fury had recently absorbed the Acadians guild, and we fairly quickly moved up to easily completing the tier 1 raids and attempting the tier 2 raids. After 6 weeks or so (in April) we had 3 tier 2 bosses on farm, and had downed 3 more tier 2 bosses (leaving just 3 to go). However, a bunch of the most experience players, including the guild officers and raid leaders, moved to other guilds, or tired of the game and returned to playing other games. There were a couple of weeks where numbers were well down, and it looked like the guild might fold. A couple of weeks ago, I and another ex-WoF guy stepped up to lead some tier 1 raids with the remaining members and a few new raiders. The raids went well, and with the new members (and a few returning members), in the last week we have downed all but one of the bosses we had previously. I now find myself an officer in the guild, and frequently involved in forming and leading raids, and it is gratifying to be able to help new people come to grips with raiding.

I am really happy with the guild I'm in. Wake of Fury had great people, but was too small. Immortal had the size, but raided at inconvenient times for me, and had some members who were sometimes a bit too precious. Primal Fury, though, has mature people whose (virtual) company I enjoy, and in numbers that make all of the (PvE) endgame content available to us.

The server, too, is a step-up from Bloodspire. Being a PVP-RP server, and because the game has been around a while, there are a lot fewer adolescent ("zOmg, I wtfpwned you, n00b!") morons running around. Being a non-Oceanic server, we aren't able to participate much in mass-PvP sieges (the siege windows are during Australian workdays), and the combination of latency and battlekeep buffs (and IMHO some exploiting) prevents us from competing with the top guilds in PvP. I'm not really a PvP fan though, so I don't feel like I'm missing much.

I will now return you to regularly scheduled programming talking about sport and my other, less geeky, day-to-day banalities.

won't someone think of the children?

LittleBigPlanet looks awesome. This is awesomer.