Post Session Reporting

Ok, time to do some catching up on my blogging, now that I finally have it working. I will quickly summarize my gaming experiences thus far in WAR.

Night one: Finally got my Shaman. I spent the night questing with Anna, trying to get a feel for the game. We ended up playing until 4am on the Thursday night of homecoming. I got to level 5, discovered some of the basics of the game, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Night two: About a week later, I finally got a second chance to play. This was my first time playing with a moderate sized group, as well as the first time I had traveled to Nordland. We attempted a peace rally on the beach, then joined the RVR Nordenwatch, in which we again attempted a peace rally on "peace island." About the only notable affect we had on the game was pissing people off. We got called gay hippies, and people used our peace rally as an excuse to come get PVP kills. The night was fun, but failed in terms of the experiment.

Night three: Night three was my first lonesome venturing. With the rest of the team in bed, I set out to lvl up Kapuey. I found by far the most effective way to do so was simply by constantly replaying the RVR matches. Also, doing so got me some cool stats, as well as teaching me a lot about the strategy of battling. I leveled up to 9 before finally tearing myself away at 3 o'clock. The last thing I did before signing off was to work on my apothecary skill, which was pretty cool.

Day four: The fourth and currently last time I've played, both groups met in full force to work towards our goals. Chaos met up in the capital city and attempted to interview people about their addictions. We met some interesting people, and I found myself really guilty to be confronting some of them about addiction. For example, one person I met told me that he had lost his job, his girlfriend, and then dropped out of school due to addiction to WoW. I felt incredibly naive and unsure of myself trying to advise him, since he clearly has much more experience than I do with such matters. After the addiction counseling mission, we set up our own PVP scenario against the Order team. Chaos got embarrassed in the match. I'm not sure if it was our levels, our characters, or simply our experience, but we were no match for the combined might of Order. In particular, Ragnarok cut through us like butter. After about 10 minutes of dying, Chaos flew the white flag and we gathered for a peace protest. At my behest, when we were recieving no out-group attention, we turned the peace protest into a fight club. The fight club, essentially a dueling grounds, attracted several outsiders, and thus may be deemed a success.

Overall thoughts:
Addiction- so far, I have yet to see any signs of addiction in myself. sometimes, when I'm bored with no work to do, I get the urge to play. Likewise, when I'm playing a game on my computer at home, I feel like I'm wasting my time and feel obliged to head to one of the game labs. However, I don't have trouble forgetting about the game, nor do I lust after playing. In fact, about the only time when I really get the urge to play is when I can't. When I didn't have a character in the beginning, I had incredible urges to play. I wanted a character of my own more than anything. The other day, I went to Thayer to try to play but couldn't get into the computer lab. Having nothing else to do at the time, I was frustrated and really interested in playing.
Group interactions- I've also noticed that the game is far more entertaining with friends. Unlike other MMORPG's that I've played, WAR holds almost no interest for me in solo questing. All the solo quests I've tried bore me very quickly, leading me to play the RVR's. Part of the reason for this seems to be the lack of customization available for my character, in terms of items and spells. In other games, if I bought a new spell or sword or such, I would immediately want to go try it out for a while. However, with my Shaman, it feels as though there's really only a few options for me. The Shaman's best moves for each level are very obvious, leaving little in terms of alternate strategies. Likewise, my items are generally pretty standard and unimpressive, cause me no undue interest to go test them out.
Anyways, I think this has been a good long post. Feel free to comment about any of the things I've mentioned