by Julie Whitefeather 

Be careful what you ask for…you might get it

Serious or not, in the last broadcast of “The Jethel Silverwing Show” Elquinjena asked for another column. I started this all as a post on the forums, but it got so long it turned into an article…

So here it is.

Lions and tigers and bears oh my…

Remember that line from the Wizard of Oz? I saw the picture above on the internet and I just had to include it here as a bit of inspiration. 

Yes, I will admit to having a bad, BAD case of “alt-itis” and EQ2 plays into that like no other MMO (or videogame period for that matter).  There are so many different race/class combinations I am still trying them out. I have a good friend in Australia who has alt-itis so bad that she bought a second account for more room for alts.

EQ2 and WoW both have classes capable of turning into animals. Yet I asked myself “Why is it necessarily a elf druid that can turn into a tiger? Why isn’t it a tiger that can turn into an elf druid? That got me thinking about my Native American background and I decided to bring it to my gaming experience. So I rolled up a Manitou and brought her to the Legion of Kithicor. 

Playing a Manitou/Tiger Spirit (a special salute to the movie Spirited Away here) in EQ2? - Priceless.  Betraying a dark elf character to the good side? – Piece of cake.  They don’t call me the “Queen of Betrayals” in EQ2 in my guild on the Najena server for nothing.

Wake up and smell the roses, coffee, gnomes…whatever…

Leveling up in a game is one thing, but stopping to really enjoy the game is another - So I have been stopping to smell the proverbial roses in EQ2 more so than with other MMOs I have played.  There is so much in EQ2 that if you hurry through you miss alot.

Case in point - just this last weekend I was riding through the desert of the Sinking Sands.  I passed a sand covered graveyard. I have learned to mouse over things I see in the landscape as I ride along in EQ2. This time I was rewarded – I clicked on a Skeleton and was whisked off far underground. Where did it go? For that you will have to wait for the next New Atittude – live from Maj’dul!
 

The good old days of gaming?…keep them!

I have been spending a lot of time in the deserts of Sinking Sands lately. So far this is my favorite area, including Greater Faydark; and and considering how much I love Faydark, that’s saying alot.  After all, it is Greater Faydark which brought me to EQ2 in the first place.

When the Echoes of Faydwer expansion came out for EQ2 I was a dyed in the wool World of Warcraft (WoW) fan. This was before I came to realize just how right Richard Garriott was when he described WoW as “an inventory management system” and before I discovered just how nasty people will be to one another in pursuit of that gear.

When I came to WoW from Ultima Online my first sight of the gates of Ironforge was a true “Oh WoW” moment for me. I was used the overhead view of UO - looking down at tiny figures - when I first came to WoW. So you can imagine my first view of a truly 3d game. While it is true that I had before that taught myself VRML (virtual reality markup language) and began to recreate a restaurant described in the book “Snowcrash” WoW was in a whole other league. The only other “oh WoW” moment I have had in gaming was when I first logged on to my trial account of EQ2/Echoes of Faydwer for the first time.

It is true, that I had begun playing EQ1 before I played WoW but that soon fell by the wayside.  Why? One very good reason why – leveling.  Now mind you I have never been one to focus on leveling – even in guilds where the majority of the other guild members are much higher in level than me.  But the leveling in EQ1, coupled with the extreme harshness of the death penalty were so…incredibly…slow…that it just sucked both the joy and the life out of the game. At the rate I was progressing I still wouldn’t have hit the level cap. Simply put, the leveling was so slow that it kept me from enjoying the world.  It was that and the focus on food.   What do I mean by that? For those of you who may not have played EQ1 you HAD to have food and drink consume.  If you didn’t you could starve to death. This wasn’t half so bad as the fact that finding or affording food became a real task for anyone beginning the game. Do I long for the “good old days” of gaming? Heck no.

Flinging some mud around…

When games like Ultima Online first came out, words like “Mudflation” hadn’t come into vogue. Some of you still may have not heard the term.  Mudflation is a term for virtual inflation  - devaluing of money or items or both.  A common cause for mudflation is when a well establish game like World of Warcraft releases a new expansion.  When The Burning Crusade came out, all those people who had spent all those hours raiding and giving up much of their real world life to get epics soon found them obsolete. When the level cap was raised from level 60 to level 70, by level 63 my uber sword of uberness (Finkle’s Lava Dredger in my case) had been replaced by a run of the mill ordinary drop.

I told you that to tell you this…

So while gold in games like World of Warcraft flows like water in the Outlands (where the last 10 levels are obtained) a game can be very frustrating when just the opposite takes place. Back in EQ1 I felt like a pauper trying to subsist on the dregs of society.  Money for armor? Heck, money for food and drink was hard enough to come by.  The hardest job in virtual economies is that given to the developers who must balance the virtual cash that flows through the games – it is a job that would task even the Wisdom of Solomon.  It is, in fact, a job so big that now companies like CCP that makes Eve Online has even hired their own professional economist to work on their game. 

Long for the good old days of gaming?- once again, my reply is heck no.  Look forward to the great things that online gaming has in store for the future? You bet. At this point there are two words in online gaming that still leaves me drooling for more…

Warhammer Online…*drools*

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather