Day 1 – Introducing myself

Last Updated on Friday, 2 March 2012 09:50 Written by Kadomi Thursday, 1 March 2012 03:00

y name is Andrea, though online I am often known as Kadomi. I live in Germany and have all my life, though I have been to the US many many times. The name Kadomi comes from my former WoW main who I played from May 2006 until October 2011. The name itself is based on the brand of pocky I was nomming on when I named her, Mikado. I am nothing but unoriginal when I name my characters. I am continuing to use this name in other MMOs and still use it on Twitter, e.g., even though I no longer play the original orc.

I started playing MMOs in March 2005. Like for many other people, WoW was my first MMO, and I picked it up shortly after European release. For years, I was passionate and excited about the game that turned gaming into a hobby, not just a pastime, but I first started to experience WoW burnout in late 2009. I moved on to single player games, then started playing LotRO for a while. My highest level character there was a level 36 warden, before I ran out of steam somewhere in the North Downs. In early 2010 after a beta that really impressed me, I started to play Rift. Again, I petered out in the mid-30s on my rogue, even though bard and riftstalker both were really enjoyable to play. In both LotRO and Rift the quality of the mid-level questing left to be desired IMHO. I completely quit WoW and any MMOs cold turkey from May to September 2010. I played single player games instead, mostly the Assassin’s Creed series. I picked up WoW again in September, but closed my US account to renew my EU account and start from scratch on my side of the Atlantic. That lasted til December when my guild fell apart over the holidays and I switched to SWTOR. That’s my current MMO of choice. For 2012 I am also interested in Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World, though I don’t have any real expectations for either.

I consider The Burning Crusade as the best WoW expansion, the height of my gaming when I felt WoW was doing everything right. I consider WotLK the beginning of the end for me, especially when it came to the difficulty of 5-man content. From a raiding perspective, I have only done 10-mans, with the exception of a few forays into SSC and TK in TBC, and ZG in vanilla.

Over the years I have become highly critical of the ability of gamers to hype games to the highest heights and then rip them apart in the most brutal way possible. This is why I am currently very wary about the hype of Guild Wars 2 as the next ‘WoW killer’. I am also what you could consider a Bioware fangirl, and enjoy both games that the Bioware haters despise so emphatically, Dragon Age 2 and SWTOR. I will always gladly admit to them being flawed, but they’re also great fun to me because of their storylines.

As far as my preferences go gaming-wise, I enjoy highly story-driven games. I have no interest in playing games that do not have a decent storyline. Which is probably why I am the worst Civilization player in the history of the world. When it comes to MMO characters, I have always enjoyed tanks and healers the most. As Guild Wars 2 seems to be ringing in the possible end of the holy trinity, I am mostly looking forward to finding the ideal support character. I have never been a good DPS player, because I have always been a perfectionist in games and was never ever satisfied with my personal DPS performance, even if it was adequate. My own expectations always killed my enjoyment of pure DPS. Hats off to the really skilled DPS, I admire and envy you.

When I am not gaming, I read a lot, thanks to my wonderful Kindle. I am married to a fellow nerd lady, and have been since 2003. She’s American and we met online on PernMUSH. Which, yes, makes me gay, which is not a big deal here for me in Germany. We play SWTOR together as a duo, and occasionally I roleplay on her Pern-based MUSH Second Pass. I listen to music a lot, in particular any form of electro, with favorites being Depeche Mode, mesh, Rotersand, DE/Vision, etc. I also find Sophie Ellis-Bextor to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and I listen to her all the time, and the fangirl in me won’t allow anyone to say anything bad about her, so nyah! I have three cats, two tigers and a tuxedo cat. They’re all lovely and cuddly and crazy, and my life would be poorer without them in it. My life would also be poorer without the friends that I made from my years of playing MU*s and MMOs, especially the Pern and Firan people I am still in touch with, and the girls from my American WoW guild.

In my current job position, I am the web admin of a small financial company that runs several blogs, and I mostly got this job because I had WordPress experience.

I always feel like I am older than most MMO bloggers out there, but then have never been ashamed of my age. I was born in 1971, so sue me. While I can’t keep up with the young whippersnappers, I feel the middle-aged MMO player bracket is actually not a small one at all, and our voices need to be heard as well.

That’s me in a nutshell. If there are any further questions you would like to ask, I am game.

Day 2 – Why I decided to start a blog

Last Updated on Friday, 2 March 2012 10:47 Written by Kadomi Friday, 2 March 2012 03:00

y first blog was Tank Like A Girl, on the same domain that I am currently hosting this blog. It was not the first time I blogged, but it was my first step out into acknowledging myself as a blogger. I have been a LiveJournal user since 2002. I was really active in LJ, and just about all my American MU* friends were active as well. I guess you could call it the heyday of LJ. My American WoW guild Daughters of the Horde is actually to this day an LJ-based guild. All members need to be female and have an LJ account, as the LJ community replaces guild forums. I don’t know how long they can keep this going, because LJ is becoming more and more unreliable, and prone to be offline for days due to yet another DoS attack on the servers. I for myself for the first time in ten years no longer have a paid LJ account.

But let’s turn back the clock. In 2007 and 08 I was still going strong. As I work full-time, the majority of my WoW playtime was on weekends, and I played a lot. Every Monday morning I dutifully posted all my WoW activities and screenshots in my LJ, even though at the time I didn’t have a lot of WoW playing friends who read my LJ. I just loved writing it all down. In late 2007, my guild finally made the push into 10-man raiding. It was an exhilarating time in my WoW life for me. Back in the day, it required effort to get your foot in the raiding door. You needed to make sure that folks all had the Karazhan key, and for that key you required all the major level 70 instances at the time. My SO and I really busted ass and maybe even cracked some whips to get people there. We wrote our first raid rules. It was all new territory for us. We were joint raid-leaders.

The level 70 instances shaped me as a tank. I felt my skills evolve as I learned how to become a better tank. I learned how to properly pull, how to use line of sight to my advantage, how to deal with multiple mobs back when warriors had no AoE tanking tools in their arsenal. It was glorious. I turned into a min-maxer brooding over gear lists and pondering how to improve. My guild’s traditionally always been low on tanks. In 2007 it was me and another warrior, and occasionally we had paladins helping out. But mostly it was us warriors. It will probably sound terribly petty and maybe a touch passive-aggressive (which I hate, I prefer a more blunt approach to conflict) but I mostly started blogging because I felt the other warrior was doing a couple things wrong in her gearing choices. She played a lot more casually than I did at the time. In my LJ I wrote a passionate plea that parry gems were not the right choice and to not always gem for socket color, in hopes that she would read it and take to it. I wrote a warrior guide for my guild’s LJ. I hoped she would read this and take something away from it. I was too chicken to actually address her in-game, because I didn’t want to piss her off. Eventually, in WotLK I did actually talk to her, and she stopped raiding with us and didn’t really talk to me anymore. Tact: not my strength. Alas! But I digress.

Anyhow, I found I enjoyed this light theorycrafting, and I really enjoyed sharing helpful tips. There weren’t a lot of warrior resources out there, and I felt that a lot of them were catering to the hardcore raiders. But casual folks needed some love too.

I greatly enjoyed Veneretio’s writings, he was my absolute hero when it came to blogging, and always will be what I consider the shining beacon of the WoW prot warrior community. I feel that when he quit WoW, it was a real loss. I felt encouraged by his blog, and so in June 2008 I finally chose to follow in his footsteps with my first post. I was a prolific writer at the time, and looking at old archives, I wish I still wrote that much. It was an exciting time, when my readership built slowly and then exploded when Tankspot put a spotlight on me just before the release of WotLK. I got addicted to receiving comments, and it was always a delight to see that the same people kept coming back for more. Veneretio asked me to join Twitter, and I did, and got to interact with my readers even more.

A couple of times I got WoW-Insidered, the WoW blog equivalent to slashdotted, and I really had very solid numbers for my readership. Ultimately, that changed blogging for me a bit. It put a lot of pressure on me. I started to get the first trolls who accused me of copying numbers off EJ without understanding them. It started to feel like an obligation, not a fun pastime, because I had set out with the high goal of not just being a WoW diary, but a warrior resource. This and my ever increasing disenchantment with the direction WoW was headed in led to my posting frequency to decline and then die. I never felt I was a strong theorycrafter, but I was a decent warrior tank who knew how to play before dungeons became 15-minute zergfests.

I still wanted to write, but my heart was not in WoW and not on warriors anymore. I still wanted to write, about other games, and books and anything else that crossed my mind. So I set up a network install for WordPress, and this little blog was born. It doesn’t even have 10% of the readership that Tank Like A Girl had, but that’s fine. It’s just my blogging corner, no resource of any kind. Oestrus recently made a post that resonated with me. Pageviews really do not matter, as long as you put your heart into your blogging. I intend to do just that. I still get excited about every single comment though. I don’t understand this new trend of 2012 of commentless blogs, because it’s not about writing into the void for me, it’s knowing that people read, enjoyed or disagreed. That’s the power of blogging for me.

Day 3 – My first day in an MMO

Last Updated on Tuesday, 6 March 2012 12:01 Written by Kadomi Monday, 5 March 2012 07:39

hen reading MMO blogs and reviews, praises and rants on games, I am always struck with the thought that we’re all chasing a falling star. As much as we hurry and chase it about, we can never catch it. Just about every MMO player I know fell in love with the first game they played. The game changer. Inevitably, no game can ever live up to the first heady days of MMO-dom. The veterans long for their dream sandbox like Ultima Online. PvP fanatics wax nostalgic about Dark Age of Camelot. Others wistfully remember their glory days in Everquest. Me, I wax poetic about how The Burning Crusade was my time of glory in World of Warcraft. I am not sure if I know any one MMO player who’s not nostalgic. We all try to re-create the wonder of our first days of playing.

Now, let me give you a little backstory about my involvement with online games because I do love to ramble. I started using the Internet in 1995 when I stumbled into the public lab of my university, and one of the first things I did was to look around for games. For years I had heard of those mystical games called MUDs, games where people played together in one fantasy world, leveling their characters. I thought that was fascinating. I have to say, it didn’t help at all that one of the first books I found in the university library was an English book about computer games on the Internet. Or maybe it was fate. I tried a couple MUDs and thought they were terrifying. When rats killed me yet again, I fled for greener pastures. That book from the library also mentioned PernMUSH. Unlike MUDs, they’re completely RP-based, and as I always enjoyed writing, that’s where I found my new home, and eventually my now-wife. Imagine WoW on a roleplay server, just without any combat opportunities whatsoever. You just roleplay, all text, all the time. A MUSH in a nutshell. Did I mention how awful using plain Telnet was? And yet that’s how I played. Took me years to actually find my first specific MU* client. One of my friends from my MU*ing days is the terrific Kathleen Shea, author of SimpleMU.

I played MUSHes for a decade. As technology advanced, I started craving something that was not just walls of text. Ultima Online was released in 1997, and of course I was very aware of it, but it was very much not mainstream. I was actually a member of the Ultima Dragons, as the Ultima games were my first game obsession, so I really wanted to play in the world of Britannia. Today, I am glad I never did, because I don’t care for sandbox games, and I most certainly do not care for PKing. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous to consider paying monthly fees for a game, when the monthy dialup costs were already crushing my tight budget. In the broadband world of today, it seems hard to remember that I didn’t allow myself longer than 1-2 hours online a day because it was too expensive.

As time progressed, a lot of my MUSH friends moved on to Star Wars Galaxies. I had a co-worker who played DAoC. When I was in the middle of yet another Diablo 2 playthrough, one of my co-workers told me about the amazing beta he was in, for a game called World of Warcraft. I was intrigued, because I loved Blizzard games, and the hype around WoW was impressive. I read up on it, and there was enthusiasm all around. I debated for a long time. Could I justify the fee? No, I still couldn’t. But hey, you got a free month of game time. I was able to justify that to me. In February 2005, WoW was released in Germany, and a month in, I picked it up, firmly convinced I would only play for that first free month. Right!

I went straight for girly stereotype (I had no idea that this would be so popular with female players as it turned out to be): female nightelf hunter. My reasoning was sound, I thought. I never completed the night elf campaign in Warcraft 3, but I liked their setting. I liked ranged combat. I felt based on WC3, my best nightelf fit would be a hunter. I never particularly cared for their looks and the bouncing, but I thought their jump was cool. I remember running around in a rather crowded Teldrassil because a month after release the start area was still packed. I had no idea what guilds did but I heard they were important, so I joined the first one that advertised in local chat. I won’t lie, I still get chills listening to the nightelf music from vanilla WoW. I still listen to the soundtrack quite a bit, I find it very soothing at work. Everything seemed huge and filled with danger, and I played like a dummy. A whole breed of melee hunters was born in that time, when you didn’t get any pet until level 10. I gaped at the NPCs in Telanaar with their riding kitties and wanted one. I died a million times in the barrows filled with furbolgs. I mean, seriously, who designed those? Close quarters, a maze, high respawn rate. It was a death trap for noobs like me. I was in there for literally hours.

I remember how mad I was at the satyr who had me pick up stuff for him and turned out to be evil. I firmly recall how purple the trees were, and how the ground shook when an Elder stomped by. I ran around Darnassus like crazy, overwhelmed by the size. On my second day of WoW, I managed to fall off Teldrassil, getting completely stuck on the lower limbs of the tree. That’s how I found out that Teldrassil was indeed a giant tree. I had to hearth away, once I actually figured out what a hearthstone was. The game wasn’t that newbie-friendly, really.

Whenever I thought myself an awesome WoW player in later years, I always thought back on that first hunter of mine. Nightelf hunters start with daggers, and so when I found a blue intellect dagger with additional shadow damage, I felt like a queen. That’s how much of a noob I was. But I had fun. I remember the death run through the Wetlands because someone had told me there was an auction house in Ironforge. It was the only one available to Alliance players. Everyone was in Ironforge at the time, Darnassus was so dead compared to it. It was like today’s Stormwind or Orgrimmar in popularity. To get there, I ran all the way from Menethil Harbor to Ironforge, along the road. I was level 12, and the crocolisks came to me like moths to the flame. It took me a long time to make it. Those are the parts I remember best.

I stopped playing her in the mid30s. That’s usually my breaking point in games (and the reason I quit LotRO and Rift both at that point). She was questing in Darkshire at the time as I never took her back to Kalimdor after the death run. Morladim killed her many times. Is he still in the game? I wonder. Darkshire is the one Alliance zone I always loved best. The horde was calling to me, and I switched to play a troll shaman instead. I have never been good at playing alts, I always need one particular character to focus on. Ultimately, the Horde won my heart. By the time my troll made it to the Barrens, I was horde for life, inside.

It was a magical time. WoW no longer feels like in those first few weeks. I actually gave WoW to one of my RL friends for Christmas. She’s a casual gamer who’s into fantasy and adventure games, and WoW is her first MMO. She chose to roll a nightelf druid and I rolled a priest and ran around with her. Based on her pace, she’s probably as overwhelmed as I was at the time. I was bored with the zone after ten minutes, as a veteran I could not take any joy out of it, and I found myself jumping around like a ferret on crack, restlessly. My friend said she dies a lot. Isn’t that fascinating? I would give anything for being back in her shoes because lack of challenge is one of the things that see me out of love with the WoW leveling game. I hope she’s having as much fun as I had at the time.

I think we all likely have fantastic memories of our first days in an MMO. If we didn’t, we likely wouldn’t have stuck around. As a jaded MMO player, we will have to come to terms with it that no game will ever feel like that again. SWTOR does not feel like WoW in the day, though it comes fairly close for me. Guild Wars 2 won’t feel like that either, I am sure. We can only ever hope that we can still approach games with the sense of wonder and openness we felt when we first started playing. Before we went into a game thinking ‘I hope there’s enough content at endgame’. Stop to smell the roses. Be open. Don’t buy the hype, but also don’t go in expecting to find disappointment because someone on the Internet said this and that game sucks. Find your own enjoyment. No game will ever be like our first one, but there’s no reason we can’t keep on looking for fun.