grind

I played tonight for the first time since last weekend, when we got our asses kicked by Order. Since the servers are depressingly quite and abandoned, I was leveling up by doing quests, all alone. And the higher you get, the harder the quests are to do by yourself. You have to go slowly and be cautious so that you don't get attacked by three npcs at once, and it's boring - I played for an hour before I was pretty sick of it.

I don't the game itself is enough to keep me interested - like everyone else has been saying for weeks, the rvr is really the only consistently fun part of the game, unless you can find a group of people who want to run around doing quests with you. I think it's taken me so long to get to this point because I was still trying to figure out how the game worked - not basic stuff, like which buttons to push, but things like the etiquette of joining someone's party or how to find a flightmaster (or, how to handle playing, talking to people in the lab, and listening to people on vent at the same time). But, now the novelty of playing the game has really worn away, and I can see what people mean about it leveling up being a grind. And there's nothing addictive for me about that aspect of the game - I just don't feel the need to do one more thing, if the thing is going to be boring.

I was in the lab this ...

I was in the lab this afternoon while Michelle was playing today, and I jumped in to do a couple quests with her. Since we've been playing in the human world, which I think is really ugly, I dragged her off to the elf world. Which is prettier, and has fewer burning buildings and plague-ridden villagers.

But I was only playing for like, half an hour, and I didn't really feel a pull to stay in (other than a general procrastination pull). I think it's maybe because there was a strictly imposed end time, and it was a really short period of time.

But I just came out of playing for the last three hours, and I was pretty distracted for most of it, so I still didn't get really into it.

Zombified...

I really am not capable of writing right now; I'm working off a week of four hours of sleep a night and just spent six hours playing. Granted, I took a couple hour-long breaks, but I have been in front of a computer way too long, and I need sleep. My justification was totally that I needed to level up before tomorrow (and I only got to level 8...what?), but that's no reason to spend that long...especially when half of my group didn't show up. I can't really play for more than a couple hours before I need a break though, which is probably a good sign.

I'm really torn about whether or not I like Warhammer at this point. I really enjoy it, but I get really frustrated when I can't figure out how to do things, like a join a party. And it happens all the time. I guess the designers don't really have any motivation for making it friendly for people who haven't played before, but it's still discouraging...

I would write more, but all I really want to do is go to sleep right now.

Wasteland

Played: Oct 18: 12-1.
Oct 19: 12:45-2:15 am


We scrapped our players in Sea of Malice and started playing in Wasteland because it's a more highly populated server. I totally thought I would miss my old Riaka and be thrown off by starting again with a new character, but I had no problems switching. It's also odd how much faster I got to level 5 this time - it took me two hours as opposed to maybe 4-5 hours when I was playing in Sea of Malice.

Before I started playing, I was writing a paper while Joe and Brendan were playing right next to me. Even though I'm not addicted, it's really hard to resist the pull when others around you are playing.

Characters

Hey guys, just to keep everyone's characters straight and everyone's inboxes clearish, respond to this post with what your character is. (From now on, when we need information from everyone, this is hopefully a better way to keep track than blitzing back and forth, especially because it gives us a record of it for the future.)

I'm a sorceress.

first impressions

I set up my account and played Warhammer tonight for the first time (after an hour of dithering about what to name myself - Zsuzsa eventually came up with a name for me), and it was totally awesome. I had a lot of reservations about whether I would actually like this game, but I was completely absorbed. Sorry about the length of this post, but there are a couple things that I want to talk about specifically:

1) Gameplay mechanics: Warhammer just kind of throws you into the game, with very little instruction about how to do anything. I've never played a game like this before, so the first few minutes were spent trying to figure out basic actions like walking forwards, attacking, and talking to people - and feeling totally confused, because I'm pretty accustomed to games providing a mechanism to learn all that in a controlled setting. After an hour and a half of gameplay, there's definitely still a disconnect: every couple minutes I got jolted out of playing because I'd want to do something and not know how, and then spend a few minutes figuring it out. Or not figure it out at all, which is so frustrating. I still don't really understand how all this fighting stuff works - I managed to kill myself once, and I have no idea how that happened or how to keep it from happening again. Hopefully there's a steep learning curve; I'm already a lot more comfortable with basic controls, and I'm already picking up hotkeys, so there's hope yet. But so far, the in-game help function hasn't been very helpful.

2) This probably makes me a bad person, but I'm really surprised at how much I enjoyed being on the evil side. It's not even like it matters at this point in the game - I'm not even doing anything yet, but there's still some basic pleasure in hearing other dark elves criticizing and taking advantage of the high elves' noble ideals.

3) After about an hour, I had a moment of dread when I realised I had absolutely no idea how long I'd been playing. I also got desensitized very quickly to the fact that my character (I'm a female sorceress) is pretty much naked. I actually had a hard time deciding what my character was going to look like (and considered being a male sorceror so I would at least have some clothes on), and I wonder why I was so quick to just overlook something that was initially distasteful: whether it's just that everyone becomes accustomed to their character's appearance and then ignores it, the fact that I'm used to scantily clad girls in video games, or something else. If my character had been ugly, instead of just naked, would I have minded more? (I think I would have. But I don't know! For those of you who play ugly things, it's something to consider.)

4) I came out of the game really wanting to talk about it. I don't know whether it's because it's been set up in my mind as a community-based game, or as a social experiment, or whether everyone wants to talk about this kind of game once they've started playing. I want to know what you guys think!

played from 9:45ish-11:15ish.