Ais.

So, here I am, my first blogging experience.

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I should start off by saying that I am not one for scholarly work. After getting my master's degree I find myself very impatient with the prospect of a coherent, well processed essay. I rather much prefer to write freely, whatever comes to my mind. This leads to what the great Philip J. Fry once said while fighting a giant brain, "There, now you're stuck in my world. A place full of plot holes and spelling errors". I also enjoy writing poetry here and there, so don't be taken back if a post I put out there is a poorly written piece of "art".




A little about myself: I have played wow since the second (or first) day of its release. I hoped around servers for a few months before Dash anchored me onto one that I loved, and one that I miss. We were a casual guild there as well, but when my real life family and friends started to play more I moved over, more and more, to my current main server. During this change my real life also was constantly altering. I received my Bacholer's of arts in Theology with a minor in History after two years at college and received my Master's after another two years in grad school. My undergrad kept me casual as my latency averaged about 300k ms (that is about 30 seconds between actions), though I still did try to keep up, I found myself leveling more than doing any endgame content.

As I mentioned before, my family and friends play this game, and I find it a great way to keep in touch with them. I feel a bit nerdy mentioning this, but I did meet my girlfriend on WoW as well. I never really was one of those guys that looked for girls online, but I always said I wouldn't exclude them because of it either. Currently I am volunteering at a high school as a teacher and she is in college. We try to keep WoW play time down and do other things, but we are limited to the internet for the time being and WoW is a great cheap thing to do over the internet (I once calculated the cost to be about 4 pennies an hour if we both played for 2 or 3 hours each day over the weekend).

So what's the real point I want to make? I think I would like to just hit on one thing for now: Casualness is relative; Hardcoreness is not. Even though I play 15 or so hours a week I consider myself a casual player, just as much so as someone who plays 3 or 4 hours a week. Whereas hardcoreness means pretty much devoting all your free time to the game. Even then, there is always someone who can beat you, or another guild that is more progressed than yours. By being casual, I think you get more bang for your buck if you take things slowly. Let's face it: Blizzard likes money, and most people do not have sponsors paying them to play the game, so the game will ultimately be geared towards the base that makes more money. What Blizzard did with Icecrown content was great, allowing all types of groups access to the same content so they can get the same story, but one group can have a slightly better gear level than the others for doing the harder stuff. I love story, that, outside of family and friends, is what I play for. WoW was never really that great with it, but it is coming along. I never thought it was fair that I did not get to see some of the cool stories in vanilla and BC because I was a casual player, but I also understand the gamer's need for a real challenge, LK does that, even though it sacrificed some class individuality. On that note: Elitism=bad. Sit around and play for hours to become the best player and discriminate against those who don't share your time or ego, it is a bad place to be for both sides in my opinion.

On a final note for now, I am looking forward to the Old Republic, and if you have not played Knights of the Old Republic and you love story, it is a must. Kotor II not so much. They are working hard on the new MMO that is based off Kotor's line thousands of years before Anikin or Luke. I was hoping to see it this year but it seems that it will be spring of 2011 (very preliminary date). Can't wait!

Well...see you on the blogosphere?
God bless,
Ais.