Dear Ladies and Gentlenoobs,

As many of you may be aware I started this blog to chronicle my adventures in Warhammer Online, a game I’ve been waiting for for a very long time. Recently I haven’t been playing it, new MMOs are not without their niggles and I am sitting tight for patch 1.1 to see if the game transforms my character into something that is viable to play. I do not want to be one of the horde of Sorceresses or other classes scattered about. At the moment I have really lost the drive to play, this is probably down to not getting fully involved in the guild I am in as well as more recently the reversion of a lot of my actual RL friends to Wrath of the Lich King (which in part I am responsible for). With the Magus not being much fun I got Wrath and have been enjoying myself a lot, I know people don’t like the game and have pretty strong feelings about it and those who play it. However, if there’s one thing I know it is to respect others and hell, if I want to play it, I’ll play it and that is what I am doing.

I do want Warhammer to succeed, but at the moment I can’t bring myself to play it. I will give 1.1 a whirl when that arrives but at the moment my game of choice has switched back to Blizzard’s masterpiece. So, could I just switch the blog focus? I could, but I don’t think that is fair, if I continue blogging then it’ll be on a new blog set apart from the legacy established here. When 1.1 hits I’ll jot my thoughts down here, that will spell out whether I’ll be staying around or not. The blog isn’t dead, it’s just on hold, anyone with an interest are therefore advised to add the feed to your RSS reader as that will update you when there are new posts without checking everyday.

What also has spurred this decision on is the viewing figures, sure I don’t have a lot of readers, however, those outside my circle of friends who come here seem to be looking for one thing only, I posted the top searches a few weeks back and I can get up to 10 readers a day at times, 2 of those will be reading the new posts, everyone else is after naked Twi’leks, of which there a distinct lack on this site. If you’re that way inclined try DeviantArt, you’ll get more success than here, but nude fan art of star wars races isn’t my thing (neither nude art of any description) so you’ll never find it here folks.

If I continue in WoW rather than WAR this blog will slowly decay like the ruins of many an ancient civilisation. This was and is a WAR blog, despite having gone off the tracks recently. Unless I suddenly receive and overwhelming response begging me to carry on don’t expect any new posts until 1.1, after that, we’ll see.

That’s correct dear reader(s), you will notice the “suspicious by it’s absense” Things I Learnt post. This is primarily down to the fact that I have had the worst possible weekend where gaming has been involved. First thing to note is that I was out on Saturday, this is purely of my own volition and had been worked out in advance. This wasn’t something that fell in my lap and put me out of kilter and delayed levelling, this absense was factored into my plan, so Saturday was a good day, spent away from the humdrum of the everyday world. Now, Sunday was a different matter, as was Saturday night. I was hoping to hit 54 on my Shaman (more on that later) this weekend. I’d gotten to 51 on Friday and was looking forward to hitting Outland in the first weekend of Christmas (December is pretty much Christmas so I renamed the month). Saturday night after returning from my outing would provide the perfect springboard to 52 and then an afternoon and evening of gaming on Sunday would leapfrog me to my target.

Wife: Enter stage left.

Now starts the derailing of an otherwise symphony of mathematical levelling precision. I paraphrase “Why don’t we invite everyone to dinner that you’re spending the day with?” Of course, wife karma means that I must accept this request (they are my friends after all and blowing them off for a game is decidely dodgy) so, everyone comes round, we have a good night, levelling plan is revised to hit 53 rather than 54, one level is not too bad. I can take that.

So, Sunday afternoon comes. “Are we OK to go to my parents for dinner?” For the love of all that is sacred……. not only do I spend the next hour drying up all the dishes that were used to entertain 4 friends along with my wife and I on Saturday night, now I have to forego my whole evening as well? Pack the laptop and some DVDs then (if I had a power supply at home I’d have taken my works laptop and a copy of WoW and used their wireless to play). I took my personal laptop and watched Transformers and the first half pf Pitch Black. I managed to get to 300xp off 52, I’ll finish that off tonight before going out. So, I got a grand total of 2 levels over 3 days of gaming. I had a plan and everything but then real life threw itself in front of my XP train and the ensuing wreck meant much delays on the line. I do however, have a mostly free week this week. I have warned my good lady that I am going to be WoWing this week. I know I have to sleep and am not anywhere near as Hardcore as I used to be, otherwise I’d really have some kind of nervous spaz over this.

This post may seem like some kind of nervous spaz, however it merely highlights the lack of time I’ve had for gaming and therefore I cannot really post a “Things I Learnt” as the only real thing I learnt was that my Shaman is awesome, an elemental and an enhancement shaman together in a group should be illegal and that nothing can screw up a weekends planned gaming quite like your better half.

Provided no more leaves fall on the track we’ll see how far we can go before the next catastrophic infrastructure failure.

<Insert amusing Monorail cat lolcat here to taste!>

See you tomorrow!

It may not be a British holiday but that doesn’t stop me being nice to people celebrating the holiday. I’ll be spending my evening trying to get a group for Zul’Farrak, I’m in quest limbo at the moment running here, there and everywhere trying to get to the next “batch” I can do all in one zone. I remember 30-50 being the hardest bracket when I got my Priest to 70, now I only have 5 levels till hitting Felwood I find I am grinding to a halt. I may end up in Felwood earlier than planned, we shall see, I don’t exactly have my leveling progress and zone list planned at this moment, I’m just doing what I can and hoping that it doesn’t take too long.

Is far less exciting than it sounds. It is the reason why I had no time to post yesterday and continues to be the proverbail thorn in my side. Busy start of the week also means that I have no gaming adventure anecdotes to share with anyone as I haven’t been playing. WAR is definitely on hold until patch 1.1 hits next month, I can’t bring myself to add yet another Sorceress to the guild and my Magus is neutered too much at the moment to keep me happy. That and the release of Blizzard’s new expansion and my falling back to the dark side means that WAR is not getting any love at the moment.

Monday night before having friends round I did a little bit on WoW, mainly checking my auctions to grab some more gold and then handing in a quest and going to tame myself a Gorilla. I’ll see how he performs sometime tonight when I get back in. Tomorrow will be the first proper night of gaming I’ll have had this week if everything stays on plan.

No time for posting today, having an absolutely manic time at work playing with barcodes not working properly. This is serious stuff. Hopefully normal service will resume tomorrow.

That’s right eagle-eyed readers, this week’s “Things I Learned” (maybe that should be “Things I Learnt..”) is under the “Gaming” category rather than the WAR category. The best laid plans of mice and men…etc….

My first ever “during the weekend” post was nothing much really, although it has no doubt shown you all what has happened and where my gaming time has been spent. This was not a decision taken lightly or made as a snap decision one sunny afternoon, a lot of thought went into it when you consider that this is just a game. I actually re-opened my WoW subscription last Saturday, I’ll write more about this later and get on with the meat of what this post should be about. Here we go.

1, Death Knight is a lot of fun to play, free Epic mount almost off the bat is ace.

2, The graphics update for WoW is pretty good actually, things look a lot sharper now, although I don’t think I agree that they have made it “less cartoony”. It still has a distinct visual style.

3, Taking my wife Christmas shopping does not necessarily disrupt levelling as much as I thought it might.

4, I had forgotten how much I actually enjoy the levelling experience within WoW.

5, Hunters are still easy mode, haven’t died once on my Hunter and my kitty Spectre does a very good job at holding aggro and ripping through anything you ask him too.

6, I don’t get the Nexus.

7, I apparently have no idea at all how to be a proper Shadow Priest.

8, Maybe I want my Death Knight to be my main instead of the Hunter I am levelling, Altaholism kicks in again….

9, MJ finds my lack of MMO taste disturbing.

10, Nothing gets my RL friends together like playing WoW again.

Eagle eyed players willnow have spotted that 1.0.5b has now hit the WAR servers. This has introduced the live event that is paving the way for the addition of the two new tanking classes and has also made sweeping changes to many of the games classes. This is of specific interest to me as I want to see if my Magus has received the buff that I was hoping she would. I’ll be giving this a go over the weekend as for the short term this may decide my immediate future in WAR. I haven’t played all that much during the past two weeks, I’ve limited my time to the weekends and much as that may be OK in may people’s eyes it doesn’t support my guild as much as I would like to and also means that I have had time to assess how I am spending my time and I am not really missing WAR at this moment. Still, I’ll play some over the weekend and report back, something else has come up which may change a few directions for me, but it is gaming related and may end up being posted here on this very blog.

I can’t actually post anything authorative at this point with regards to the new patch, I’ve read some forums to see how things are from those who are far more active in game than I am. With all the spell damage increases I’m interested in finding out how much of a buff the Bright Wizards have gotten. I know that they don’t get a lot of love from Destruction players so we’ll have to wait and see what the devs did. I don’t really want to put up a lot of stuff that is essentially idle specualtion until I can go ahead and confirm things for myself and bring my own thoughts to the table, so this post may seem a little pointless, being as it is merely a statement of intentions. However, we have something new to play with and it will be interesting to see just what the first major patch has done to the game, no doubt other players are looking at things in great details as this is going to set the tone about what to expect from Mythic in the future. After all, we pay a monthly fee for this game and if things aren’t up to scratch we move on, the most recent casualty of this is Age of Conan. Luckily for me I have the kind of PC that can run it easily, although there was a distinct shift in quality from the starting area and then going out into the big wide world. If everything was as polished as those first 20 levels, I think more people would have stuck with it. Graphics alone do not make an MMO and there was a heavy PvP focus there, in fact, looking back on it, my Demonologist was pretty much gimped the same as my Magus is now…… interesting.

So, this weekend may be the make or break time for some subscribers, let’s see what happens and I’ll do a normal report on the weekends findings early next week.

Just thought I’d post some information from my Dashboard that gives me all kinds of wonderful statistics about how little people actually visit and read my blog. Far from being depressing, it provides little gems such as these;

This debate rages through communities on both sides of the gaming divide. MMOs are a massive genre these days and the amount of new games that are released is preposterous, I am sure that for every new game announcement for any other genre it is matched by a new MMO. They are that prolific. After all, why not, World of Warcraft boasts a subscirber base at over one sixth of the total population of the United Kingdom, it is nothing short of a phenomenon, bring gaming to a section of people that might otherwise not have indulged in sitting before their PCs for endless hours watching various coloured bars progress from one side of a screen to the other.

The easily accessible nature of WoW has been its success. No other game that I have played was as easy to get to grips with as WoW, no complicated crafting process that loses endless amounts of materials, easy to follow (for the most part, I’m thinking of you aquatic form quest) quests and the ability to run on a first generation Game Boy. There are many things that have contributed to the success of Blizzard’s magnum opus (not least the number of Chinese gold farmers, around 10 million of those 11 million subscribers by my estimates) but I don’t think that anyone in their wildest dreams thought it would be as big as it is.

This causes some problems for other companies however. Every new game that takes its first breath has a thread on its forums proclaiming “Is this a WoW killer” or some such other outlandish statement. WoW is like the mythical Hydra, you cut off one of its heads and two grow back in its place. Blizzard are very good at copying other games success points and borgifying them into the WoW collective (think Achievements as a direct port of WARs Tome of Knowledge). I personally think that nothing will kill off WoW, it has just become that much of a behemoth. However, what other games can do is to NOT try and kill it, such things are with WAR.

I know people who have quit WAR to go back to WoW, I have no problem with this, people are free to decide which game to spend their hard-earned cash on. WAR and WoW offer very different experiences, I’ve been in the end-game raiding of WoW and enjoyed the vast scope of RvR that is at the heart of WAR. Before playing Mythic’s new kid on the block I was never much of a PvP player, I’d done enough to get a Black War Ram in WoW but PvP is WoW isn’t exactly awesome. Try stopping the kiddies from zerging the farm in Arathi Basin and you’ll see my frustrations born out. Yet we still have arguments saying that one of these games is not better than the other and WAR will never kill off WoW. Well, I don’t want it to, WAR caters to a different crowd, sure many of us have been through WoW on the way but these games are different and although there is a competition for subscribers they each posses two different areas of the MMO market. If you want to fight other players rather than a pure PvE game then head on into WAR, there are PvE elements but a lot of the fun is going to be found grinding other players into the dirt. Sure the game has its issues, but it has only been out for a couple of months and there is a rather hefty looking patch on the horizon. It’s not like WoW hasn’t received massive updates over the years.

WoW has had the advantage of time to settle down and get comfy in its MMO gilt throne, the best that many can hope for is seemingly to bask in its shadow as poorer clones of the almighty. Yet, those who dare to be different and change the main focus of their game have much to be gained. Other games’ problems are WoWs success, it has grown to such heights that anything that comes after it will end up compared to it. This is like Golf, few doubt that Tiger Woods is the greatest player the world has ever seen and whoever comes along now is going to be judged against his standard, harshly unfair perhaps, but that is what happens when one raises the game. Is WAR good, yes, does it have its problems, sure it does, but WoW has some problems that have been unresolved for a large period of time, just speak to the Paladin community to see if they feel that their class has yet achieved a proper direction. Is WoW good, yes it is, I enjoyed all the time I spent there, even when the incessant raiding came at the expense of other more important aspects of my life. Are they as good as each other, maybe, but in different ways, there are things I dislike about WAR and WoW, there are things I like about both, yet those things are different in each game.

Rather than debating which one is better all the time we should be able to agree that they both do things well in what they choose to do, personally, if you want a PvE game I’d say hit up WoW, if you want to fight people all the time then WAR is more likely to be your cup of tea. Neither is going to kill the other off, the problem seems to merely be that because WoW came out first and has been going for such a long time that is has a stranglehold on a lot of people that may have been tempted by other games. I know that many of the people I played WoW with have gone on to various MMOs after we departed. What is interesting to me is that no matter how good a game is, if you don’t have a community to be a part of you can sour the experience. My WoW history involves a lot of cool people who I had a lot of fun with, the same with SWG. I have played many MMOs and each will retain a piece of my heart devoted to it, some more than others.

So, which is better out of the two titular fighters?

Neither…

…and both.