This post may come off a little negative, but that’s not how it’s intended. I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to why SWTOR didn’t grab me, or rather, it did, but couldn’t keep me. One of the major issues I had wasn’t really an issue at all, but is just how gamers perceive things. There are a lot of ‘things’ that I’m used to having in games, thanks to those who have been around for 5+ years. I realize it’s incredibly unfair to judge a game that releases today against a game that has been around for many years because after all that game has had time to grow – but – as a gamer, we are not interested in how things were 5 years ago, or how they will be 5 years from now. What we are interested in (and I use the term ‘we’ loosely here before someone throws a fit) is what is available NOW. At this exact moment that we are playing. If I can play a game that offers me 5 things that I really want from my video game, as opposed to a game that offers me 9 things that I really want from my video game, which game do you think I’m going to play? It doesn’t matter how old or how new a game is – in order to KEEP me playing, it’s going to have to appeal to those things on my list, and lets face it, the older games have had more time to work out what those ‘things’ are and to add them.

I feel very strongly that in order to actually compete with games that are 5-10 years old, games that are being released today need to take that progress into account. Dusty made a very good point yesterday regarding SWTOR – if you are leveling alts you can’t simply say “well, I leveled in Balmorra last time, so this time I’ll go to planet X instead.” There’s no alternate rout for you to bring your characters, where as (as an example) in EQ2 if you leveled in Thundering steppes last time, you’re more than welcome to head to Nektulos Forest. Or Butcherblock Mountains. Or do dungeons. In WoW you also have the choice of where to spend your time. In Rift? Not so much. SWTOR? Also not so much. Again this is an unfair comparison and I know it is, because the two later games are much newer, and thus haven’t had the time to add new content – but that’s simply how it is. In order to compete with games that are 5-10 years old, you must think of yourself as one of those games. I realize that there’s only so much manpower a company can dedicate to a game, and I also realize that this is pretty much an impossible task – but for us selfish gamers, that’s how we’re thinking. We’re going to constantly compare any new game to those we have played previously. Those older games have already gotten their hands on us, we’ve already got ties to them – new games need a way to get those hands on us in a MUCH faster way, so that we’ll stay.

When it comes down to it, that’s why SWTOR didn’t have the staying power required for me to keep playing. Were the stories amazing? Sure they were, I loved them. I loved having choices for my characters to make. I experienced very few bugs (personally, I know others have a long list of bugs), and datacrons and exploration were fun. The problem is (aside from the story lines and character choices) I can get those things in any other game on my list, plus more sandbox features which is key to me sticking around in any game. I play alts, they need choices that will be different from my mains. Sure, I can choose a different *story* for them, but they’re basically doing the exact same things (as long as we’re the same factions) as my main, minus the class quests. They’re visiting the same zones, collecting the same datacrons, and when I dislike a zone like Balmorra (those lifts.. that map.. OUCH) I have no alternate rout. Now, maybe game companies have given up on trying to retain players and instead are working to build up their first-time sales, which is completely fine if that’s the way they’re trying to operate. Obviously that’s not how I’d prefer things done but hey I’m not a gaming company trying to make money, I’m just a player.

Anyhow, those were just some of my thoughts on player retention. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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My Operative managed to obtain her first space ship last night as I sailed into level 17. This means I also earned a second companion, one I can send out on crafting missions without having to sacrifice my safety. I actually enjoy crafting in SWTOR, even though it’s not very hands on and can take a lot of time if you haven’t earned standing with your crew members.

Santa was very good to me this year. I got a new video card, a Radeon HD 6950, which replaces the two crossfired 4850′s that I was using. There was nothing technically wrong with the cards, I’ve been able to game just fine – but they were INCREDIBLY loud. It felt like a jet was flying overhead any time I started up a game. This new card is a dream, silent, and powerful. I used to use Nvidia cards, but one year I burned through three of them so I switched over and haven’t looked back. I moved all of the settings up to high quality and it runs very well.

I’m still playing WoW despite the lack of posts lately. I’m doing the Twilight dungeons, and this week I won three pieces of gear from the LFRaid tool on my shaman. She had not won a single thing before now, so I’m quite pleased. I have been taking a small break from leveling up the druid, I was a bit burnt out after getting her to level 70. I’m sure I’ll get back to leveling her once the holidays have calmed down.

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas, filled with lots of loved ones. As always, happy gaming. No matter where you find yourself.

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Hard to believe that today is already December 15th – where does the time go! My apologies for those who may have been trying to access MmoQuests these past few days. My host was hacked and so the site has been less-than-stable while they resolved issues. It looks like everything is a-go now, so I should be able to get back to posting here on a regular basis, so long as something shiny doesn’t come along and distract me along the way.

There are numerous holiday festivals taking place in MMOs this time of year, and I love hearing about them all. A few of my favorites happen in Guild Wars, Wizard 101, EverQuest 2, Rift, and of course World of Warcraft. That by no means lists all of the events out there though, so make sure you take a peek into your GoC (game of choice) and take part in the yearly events (if there are any, not all games have these).

Dragon Flight (my Argent Dawn alliance based guild) managed to take down a few more encounters in some Outlands raids last week. This was quite a feat for us because we’re still only three people (actually, now we’re five, but two of them are too small to participate in these raids). We’ve been doing them for appearance gear and my shaman won herself a pair of neat shoulders that have a graphic of glowing broken up molten infused rocks.

Aside from that I’ve been working on leveling both a DeathKnight and a Druid. The druid managed to grasp on to level 62 tonight, and the DK is 61. I do have a recruit a friend account, so they’ve only got a few hours played if that. While getting to ‘end game’ is not everything, I’ve taken my time and enjoyed the ride on a handful of alts and this time I just wanted to get to Cataclysm content.

In true nomadic gamer style I haven’t really settled on a ‘main’ although I tend to play my shaman more than my other characters. I also spent some time playing Plants vs. Zombie, and Skyrim. The majority of my friends are all playing SWTOR – and it’s been really hard to hold out and not just pre-order the game for myself. In fact, there is a copy in the house, belongs to my other half. He’ll be playing and I can make a character on his account and play while he’s at work to see if the story actually does suck me in as everyone says it will. A few friends have pointed out that Star Wars has very little to do with ‘space’ and has far more to do with fantasy and magic, which is a big point in its favor (for me at least). I even sat down to try to watch the Star Wars movies today, so who knows, give it some time and perhaps that will be my GoC.

In sadder news, Beckett MOG shut its doors today. For those who don’t know I’ve been writing MMO related articles for them for a number of years now, as well as moderating their forums and writing news articles for the web site. They just weren’t pulling in enough money (or so I assume) and in this age of digital media, it’s not a big surprise. I hope that everyone who is now searching for new work (I’m looking at you, Jason) finds the job of their dreams, and I personally am incredibly thankful for the experience I’ve gained while working there.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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The Darkmoon Faire is a topic I actually meant to write about last week, when it was around, but alas time slipped away from me as it so often does and so you’ll have to deal with this post being a few days late. Remember that festival that came at the start of every month and has for years but no one actually participated in? Well, the good folks over at Blizzard finally gave it an overhaul, and boy did they do a fantastic job. The Darkmoon Faire now actually feels like a festival. There is an entire zone dedicated to the happenings now, which you can access by being ported (there are NPC in the capitol cities) or by visiting the front gates:

•  Eastern Kingdoms, on the south side of Goldshire in Elwynn Forest
•  Kalimdor, in Mulgore at the base of Thunder Bluff

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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While I’ve been wishing that people would simply be nicer to one another, some others have gone a different rout. I’ve been doing the new twilight dungeons quite a bit (for both gear upgrades and valor points) and have come across some folks that I think could use a little Christmas cheer.

Player 1: “Wow DPS sucks.” – a few things to note here. Number one, not a single thing went wrong with this group. We killed everything, there were no deaths, in fact the entire run was as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen. If there was DPS lacking I certainly didn’t see it. The person making the comments threw out a number of snide remarks while the rest of the group said nothing at all (well, O.K. that’s not true, I did mention that if they found the DPS lacking they could leave. Remember folks, it doesn’t matter what role you play in a group, you ARE replaceable).

Player 2: “Look at all my cool stuff I am the awesomesauce” – Do you REALLY need to link every piece of your gear into chat before we’ve even started the dungeon? Is this supposed to make me think that you are amazing? A better sign would be to move out of the gosh darned fire that spreads on the ground instead of dying.

Player 3: “LULZ TANK FAIL” – This actually comes from one of the Dragon Soul raids. They’ve been a great test in my patience and my skill of selective reading. The first four raids go incredibly well, there’s not really a lot to them. The next four raids I have had little to no luck with so far. People are either incredibly impatient and start the encounter before half the raid has arrived on the scene, or they decide explanations are not required for new players. Or something else happens like they ‘forget’ that the entire encounter is based on clicking on a single button in the center of your screen when the mob casts twilight. Whatever the case, the blame is NEVER theirs, and ALWAYS someone else’.

There are a few other types of players that I think could use a little Christmas cheer this year, hopefully I get my wish. If not, that’s what selective reading is for. I rarely ever let someones comment in game get to me, I can always change it to something pleasant in my mind.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

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As I do every year the week that NaNoWriMo finishes up, I took a week off and decided to do nothing but relax and game, and a LOT of gaming was done. It was basically my ‘calm before the storm’ as December gets under way with the hustle and bustle of Christmas holidays and everything that entails. I had a lot of time to spend working through the finer points of 4.3 which released last Tuesday, and this weekend was spent doing as much as I could with guild mates (a huge thank you to Toargo and Detch who put up with more PUG dungeons than anyone deserves to see in a single weekend).

I enjoy the latest WoW patch but there’s one small issue I have with one of the new features that was added. This probably comes as no surprise to those who are playing, but for those who are not, it’s void storage. See, void storage is supposed to be considered ‘long term’ storage. The problem I currently have with it is that you pay 100g to unlock the void storage slots – and then you pay 25g for every item you put into storage, whether or not you’ve put it there before or not. Also unique items can not be placed there (such as some tabards that you may actually wish to store long term). I’ve come to the conclusion that this is nothing more than an annoying money sink for those who have too much coin. Thankfully I don’t suffer from such an affliction.

The three new dungeons are fun but a little quick and quite simple. You need to do them in order the first time to unlock the next, and out of the three the first one is probably the hardest. ilevel 378 gear drops in abundance and I managed to boost all three of my 85 characters to raid-capable (ilevel 372 using the LFRaid tool) in short time. My favorite encounter is the hourglass fight on the first dungeon where one person in the group gets to re-set time (and you can do this up to five times in the encounter) and you watch everything roll back at hyper speed. It’s a great fight because you get to blow all of your cool downs at once and you don’t take any durability hits for dying because sooner or later someone is bound to die and time will be re-set. I also love the second dungeon, where you stealth around the zone avoiding demons and then eventually fight masses of them all at once while being protected by NPC. The third dungeon is also quite a lot of fun, you escort Thrall and he helps your group. In fact he managed to defeat encounters that my groups have some times wiped on. I think he should just solo the entire zone.

Thanks to all of these amazing dungeon runs the little guild of three managed to ding level 5! This was a huge accomplishment for us, it means we start earning cash for completing dungeon runs and we also earn a little for each mob that we kill and loot (5% goes to the guild bank). It has taken us quite a lot of work to get there, but I’m pleased.

I hope everyone had an amazing weekend, no matter where you found yourself! As always, happy gaming!

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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O.K so maybe I didn’t exactly kiss a girl, but I did decide it was time to try the Looking for Raid tool that came out with the 4.3 patch – and I have to say, I didn’t hate it. Even though I was in a raid with 24 random strangers, for the first time in a long time I saw communication going on. People were discussing the encounters and what tactics players would need to use in order to survive and win. The first LFRaid dungeon involves four bosses. Players receive 250 valor for defeating the first ‘wing’ and each time you see loot from a mob it locks you from rolling until re-sets on Tuesday – whether or not you actually WIN a piece of loot. I didn’t win any, but the 250 valor was really nice, and I’m looking forward to going again next week. You can continue to run the raid and earn a little coin each time if you’re interested in just learning mechanics or have some sort of raid-craving that doesn’t get fulfilled by your small friendly guild. The encounters are not THAT difficult, but it does require people to know what they’re doing, especially the third boss which involves some slime that needs to be killed in a specific order. If someone calls out the wrong slime that can be a recipe for disaster (as I found out).

I also managed to clear my way through the three new twilight dungeons, which were a lot of fun and quite simple. The first zone is by far the worst of the three, the two that followed were much more simple. The first zone involves some random named and depending on which one you get it can be a bit of a pain. The finally fight in that zone is one of my favorites though and I’ll get into more detail about it in another post this weekend.

For now, it’s time to play! Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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NaNoWriMo is done for another year, and I’m incredibly happy to report that I managed to make my 50,000 words happen on time. I’m even happier to announce that after some editing and a few other process that need to take place, this book will be available in the amazon store as an e-book. I’ll make future announcements about it in early January for those who are interested, and I have to admit, I am incredibly excited. It’s the first of three books I have scheduled to release, and while I don’t necessarily think they’re for everyone, hopefully someone out there enjoys reading the books as much as I did writing them.

As such, I have decided to take the next week off and relax. Aside from the occasional blog post here  and finishing the details on the 2011 Gamers Secret Santa, I am not doing any writing or even looking at anything I’ve written. December is a busy month no matter where you are, and I know that before too long the days will be filled with frantic shoppers trying to force their way through stores, and tempers will grow short over this and that. I think some times we all just need to remind ourselves that we are not in the great rush that we all think we are. Just take a moment and slow down.

This is exactly the attitude I’ve adapted with my gaming. While everyone is rushing out to explore the three new dungeons added in 4.3 I headed to old Burning Crusade raid zones with my guild mates in order to hunt for appearance gear. Our first stop was not a B.C. raid at all, but Molten Core, where we all snagged a handful of neat gear for appearance purposes. Then we headed to two other smaller raids and found ourselves with armfuls of appearance gear. My little shaman has a batman theme going on and I think it looks incredibly cute on her.

“Age of Discovery” was finally announced for December 6th, so if you’re eager to be playing a beastlord the wait is not that much longer. I have been popping in on the Antonia Bayle server to decorate but not much more then that these days. I’m just having too much fun in World of Warcraft (I know, that sounds incredibly wrong, but it’s the truth). As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself, and remember to take a minute or two, and just relax.

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Despite the lack of posts, I am indeed still here! I have been busy completing my NaNoWriMo story for this year, I’m 4,500 words away from the goal of 50,000 and considering I wrote 5,600 today I’m not too worried about meeting that number. It’s been a very quick month, November always seems to go by way too fast. As such I’ve barely played Skyrim at all, I just haven’t had the free time. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, a lot of knitting, and I’ve been having a blast in WoW. I know, why am I playing that crummy game, eh?

Well, my little guild is level 4, almost level 5. We’ve been inching our way along doing weekly dungeons since the guild consists of three members. I also managed to get my shaman to 85, which makes her my third 85 character. I really enjoy playing the shaman as both a melee dps and a healer. I’m finally able to enter the ZG and ZA (Zul’Aman, Zul’Gurub) dungeons, and she’s parsing quite well. I started doing firelands quests on her (groans) because the gear would be a significant upgrade, and I’m anxious to see how she performs in PvP since I have never attempted it on the shaman before.

Aside from that I’m gathering the last bits of information to get my 2011 Gamers Secret Santa off the ground, this year has fewer participants than last year but still a nice steady number (75+ people at the time of this post). Then there’s also Christmas shopping for my family which is going a bit slower than I would have hoped, but I’m sure will come together closer to the 25th.

It’s hard to believe that November is almost over. I can’t believe how fast it’s gone. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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Hard to believe there is only a week left of November, which means only a week left for NaNoWriMo. I have been trucking along, but due to a series of events beyond my control (ok, if I were less of a klutz they would be in my control I suppose) I’m still two days behind in my writing. I hope to make that up between today and tomorrow, but we’ll have to see how it goes. I’m sitting on 36,000 words to my NaNoWriMo novel so far, and I’m closing in on the last bit of writing a lot quicker than I would have expected, even taking weekends off. The story is one I’m quite happy with and while it does need some work, that’s what December is for. I will hopefully have exciting news regarding this whole adventure some time around the end of December / beginning of January. We’ll just have to see.

When I’m not writing I’m still trying to sneak in some time here and there for gaming, but that time has been less and less these days. I FINALLY finished doing all of the Fireland quest chains, and today obtained my mount. It’s fire-filled, and great. I’ve also been playing Glitch here and there when I can, and I wish I could say that I’ve been playing Skyrim but I just haven’t had the time.

I hope all of my friends who are celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow have a great time of it! I celebrated mine already here in Canada, but that doesn’t mean I can’t live vicariously through all those people enjoying turkey this week! Many hugs.

Remember, if you want to participate in the 2011 Gamers Secret Santa, you only have until DECEMBER 1st to register!

©2012 MmoQuests.com. All Rights Reserved.

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