First, let me lay some groundwork.  Kendrick is the guild leader of a large raiding guild – a casual raiding guild, but still a raiding guild.  I’m the guild leader of a tiny friends-and-family casual guild.   While I led a few raids in EQ, I’ve yet to be on one in EQ2 in 5 years of playing, and I’m unlikely ever to be on one.  While I would enjoy doing the 12-man city raids, I have no interest in doing what it would take to turn my tiny guild into one large enough to do the 24-man raids, and I’m also not going to jump ship to a larger guild just to raid.  Besides – week nights the only night I stay up past 10:30 is the night I have a team game of Civ 4 with friends, and Saturday nights Sisca and I play D&D with those same friends.  I like my sleep too much to become a raider!  (For the record, I’m over 40 and I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ launched in ‘99)

As noted elsewhere on this blog, Sisca and I only recently reached 80, with his monk and druid, and my guardian.  Next highest in the guild is a 72 necromancer, followed by my 67 conjurer, and then a 62 berserker and a 60 wizard (who has been playing for about a month ).  Even ignoring time zones and varying work/D&D schedules, with those levels and classes we’re barely capable of grouping up for instances in, say, Tenebrous Tangle – we can’t yet do Kunark instances let alone TSO ones as a guild. 

I’m a hardcore-casual player – I play a lot of hours, I read blogs and the forums, I spend time figuring things out.  I play a guardian – I like being a tank, the guardian fits my image of Lore, and I’m a good tank.  If I was a min-maxer though I’d switch to the pally or the SK, as a guardian is best suited to raiding whilst they are more flexible in instances.    But, I also really don’t worry about ‘best’.   While I do choose AA’s that I think make sense for how I play, and my role, I don’t try to figure out what THE BEST setup is.  The alchemist had fallen behind in levels, so I went through a good chunk of the 60’s and 70’s using App1s and a handful of Adept 1s, getting App4s as he leveled – I certainly didn’t have Adept 3s, let alone Masters!    When we went to Kunark from LP at about 67 I was wearing the level 62 MC BP and legs, with a fairly random assortment of drops and quested gear for just about everything else, and frankly it stayed that way till we hit 78? and started doing the solo shard quests in Lavastorm….

I hear a couple consistent arguments against the RAs.  The first is simply that they are free, and you should have to ‘work’ for them.  I frankly admit that I don’t get that.  Firstly there IS a cost associated with them – the cost of 1) time waiting, 2) choices (which one do I get for which avatar) and 3) the cost of first acquiring the Adept 3.   Now, some say time is not a cost.  I would argue that in an online game, time is the only cost.  For anything.  Why don’t I raid?  First and foremost it comes down to time – I don’t have the time to build up a raiding guild, I don’t have the time to commit TO a raiding guild.   Why don’t I, and others, do more instances to ‘fish’ for those rare Master drops?  Time again!  It takes time to put together a good group, it takes time to run that instance, and it takes time, possibly weeks or months of it, to get ‘lucky’ on the drops.   That’s time I prefer spending other ways.  I love a good instance crawl!  I don’t love crawling the same instance night-after-night-after-night.   Any thing you or I do in a game is paid for with the coin of our time.  Our real life time.

The second argument is vaguely altruistic – I’m against it because it hurts the casual players! is the cry.  Strangely enough, I mostly hear this from people who aren’t casual players.   The truth is, it really doesn’t.  Yes, TSO was tuned around the assumption that the player base was Kunark geared, and with Adept 3s.  It’s thus not unlikely that Odus will be tuned around the assumption that the player base is in TSO gear (at least tier 1, possibly tier 2) and Masters.  You know what?  That’s nothing new.  It has always been that way.    Raiders shrug and move on, because they are in raid gear and fully Mastered.   That’s fine and fair enough  – and with the new way of doing raids moving forward, I in fact wonder if perhaps the ‘easy’ mode will be tuned without assuming full Masters and Shard two gear….  after all, part of the problem has always been tuning such that your average player could still do content while not boring your bleeding edge to death.

Here’s a key fact for my point of view though – when Odus releases it will be the first time I’ve ever been max level at the time an expansion was released to raise the level cap.   Amongst casual players happy about the addition of RAs, I suspect I’m not even unusual.  Maybe it will play out differently in that situation, I don’t know – what I do know is that I am used to each expansion being harder than the previous, with the expectation that I fully geared there, even though odds are I didn’t.   And somehow I always manage.  I’m not looking for Masters to give me an edge in Odus – I’m looking forward to them giving me an edge in older content!  I can’t do TSO and Kunark instances today – my hope is that with Masters my husband and I can, if not with both of us two boxing, then with our two other regularly-playing guildies when they finally catch up.

As to Odus?  Well, we’ll be in the beta and we’ll feedback about the concerns of the casual-players – the ones not in full tier 2 shard gear with a complete set of Masters, and hey, the devs might even listen.   Near as I can tell Rothgar is one of only a few who is a dedicated raider, amongst the others many seem to have playing experience that mirrors mine.   Failing that, well, there will be new spells, and new gear – if I level in TSO and Kunark to 85, and then venture into the first quests of Odus I suspect I’ll do just fine, and that would not exactly be a hardship.    There is still a ton of content in Norrath I have yet to complete!  And that is why, despite the arguments, I like the RAs.  Even ignoring the fact that I intend to use them for level-locked alts and my Ranger Down! barbie doll level 45ish ranger, not just (or even mainly) my main!

It was just the internet connection, cable still worked just fine, so we called, they checked, it was working intermittently but at much slower speed so they were going to send someone out…on SATURDAY!. Suddenly, on Thursday it was back, though we did still get the occasional drop, and I got an automated call saying it might have been fixed remotely and asking if I wanted to cancel the service call. Needless to say I declined. It appeared to be working Thursday night and Friday night but on Saturday morning it was back to dropping offline. I called, naturally while I was on hold it came back on, and they said the earliest the could send someone was Sunday afternoon. Lore had to do some testing for her project at work on Sunday so she called them back, told them Sunday was unaccepetable, especially considering we had originally had an appointment for Saturday that we had canceled because they had "fixed it remotely". They agreed to try and get someone to come out that afternoon and promised her a call back by 2:00 PM to let her know if it was going to be possible. After getting no call by 3:00 she called back only to first find that they could locate the call tracking number she’d been given and then when she finally got through to someone they told her sorry the earliest was going to be Sunday after all.

By this time the cable is back to mostly working and it continued to mostly work all day Sunday. Sunday afternoon the guy shows up, checks everything in the house, replaces one connector where the cable comes in the attic but I think that was just for show. When he goes to check the connector box, in our neighbors yard, he finds that the cable has been damaged, probably by a weedeater. He ends up replacing the cable run from the junction box to the house due to the fact that water had gotten into the damaged section of the cable. I’m still not 100% convinced that was the problem since, as I said, we would go for hours at a time with no issues and the TV never had any issues.

Not that it matters, since we’ve had connectivity issues with them before and since Comcast has announced this whole bandwidth throttling thing Lore has been down on them for awhile now. With this round of issues we’ve decided to switch back to Speakeasy DSL. It’s not quite as fast but it’s fast enough, we very rarely had any connectivity issues with them and when we did they were always upfront about the problem and very responsive. The only reason we switched was because Comcast offered a good deal on the TV/Internet combo which has long since expired. As an example of the difference, when we called Speakeasy offered us $20.00 a month off the regular price if we signed up for a year and an additional $10.00 off for being a returning customer and waived the installation fee. They’ve also sent us daily updates about where the install stands which to me is more important than the discounts since it shows a willingness to communicate with their customers.

I was actually able to get some gaming time in this weekend so I’ll update that later.