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I’m playing with the theme, so the appearance may change randomly and without notice until both Sisca and I are satisfied. Excuse the dust!

Apparently we were set up to require site registration to comment (and since we host our own site, the generic WordPress id didn’t work). For now I’ve turned that off, but I haven’t found the place to turn off comment moderation, so I suppose that’s the compromise. I don’t really expect much spam anyway.

With the advent of guildhalls starting at guildlevel 30, The Revellers made a strong push to level the guild. Sisca and I are two of the only four active members right now, and we have the highest-level adventurers (and I have one of the two level 80 crafters). Everyone helped though — we ran alts and mains both through some of the lower-level heritage quests, everyone did the harvesting quest series for the guild construction, and we all did both adventuring and harvesting writs.

For the final push, Sisca, Acsis and Loredena (all 63/64 at the time) collected all 4 of the ‘kill Sentries in Tenebrous Tangle’ writs and headed topside. We could get there, kill 20 sentries, and head back to Qeynos for a fresh batch of writs in less then 10 minutes per cycle. Three or four rounds later, we dinged 30!

After a fair amount of discussion, it was decided to purchase our guild hall in N Qeynos. We considered Gorowyn as being accessible to good and evil alike, but since we are primarily Qeynos based, and I liked the ‘look’ of the Qeynos halls better, that’s where we settled. Sisca, as original guildleader, did the honors. We failed to get a ‘now purchasing’ screen shot though, sorry!

We’ve designated one room as a library, and other as the crafting area. Kennet, Reyder’s monk alterego, is busily experimenting with housing items before decorating the room he called dibs on. He has some unique ideas, so I’ll be sure to post screenshots once he progresses a bit more!

Technorati Tags: eq2,everquest 2,the Revellers,guild Halls

Since the last EQ2 update I’ve been pulled by competing desires.   Guild Halls our coming next update (probably today!), so we want to get the guild to 30 – as of Sunday, we’re 70% through 29!  Considering our size (4 active members) I’m really happy with how far we’ve come!    At first I was running all of my avatars through the harvesting quests – the first time with each, you receive AA, and you get guild status.  Also, 10 gives a scroll for one’s house, 20 a statue, and 30 a title.  I think Loredena, Serrenial, and Fellbrood made it to the title – Serr can harvest tier 8, so she actually did all harvesting quests, while I actually pushed Fellbrood’s armorcrafting to 40 just to open up another harvesting tier.   I like the evil side statue (a dragon) better then good’s ( a knight) but don’t really have the energy to grind out that many more harvest runs with my other evils.  Taking my lower level avatars harvesting in higher-level tiers was pretty good guild status (at 30 Lemi got 16K for tier 7, which is better then Serr gets doing a level 80 writ!) but rather slow and death-prone.  I did do all the levels of the crafting journeyman series with each as I went though, as well as Duggin’s Hungry Halfling quests where available.

This last update also added a murder mystery – the Seeress of the Temple of Life (Rodcet Nife’s prophet) was killed.   Everyone ran some of the (rather boring) bone chip quests to get the orb to 100%, and then we spent time solving the mystery on both sides.   I really enjoyed the first time through on either end, though it most definitely is time consuming!  But, the evil and good sides are of course close parallels, so not quite as entertaining the second time, and the third and fourth was rather boring.   The quest rewards are exceedingly good, so I’m glad I ran it with my main avatars, but it was a bit tedious towards the last.   One thing about the rewards is quite nifty – two of them grow with you!   They are at the x5 level, and they can be mounted to display in your room.   Mounting and then unmounting them (making them usable again) will set them at the closest x5 level.  Thus, should you acquire them at 25, you can level them to 35 and so on to 75.  This makes them exceedingly good rewards all told.

When I was a kid my parents were involved with a wide variety of groups from garden club to bridge groups to bowling leagues while I was involved in scouting and church groups. As an adult, back before the spread of the Internet, I was in my share of bowling leagues or softball teams. I also was a member of HAL-PC (the Houston Area League of PC Users) back in the early 90′s and not only participated in the BBS message boards but also attended the monthly meetings and other social gatherings. All of these things were really about finding a group of people that you enjoyed hanging out with and creating an excuse to hang out, laugh, joke and talk about the things you had in common.

While listening to a recent Van Hemlock podcast [27 August 2008]  I came to realize that, for me at least, MMO’s in general and specifically the guilds or groups of friends that I play them with take the place of those social gatherings. They are primarily an excuse to get together and laugh, joke and talk about our common interests and maybe pick up some new interest.

Even the hardcore raiding guilds could be considered the natural evolution of those social structures. If you’ve ever been around a bowling alley on league night you’ll realize that while many of the leagues are an excuse to get together and drink beer, some of them are actually very intense and competitive with their members spending a lot of their time perfecting their game. (Hmmm…there’s a whole other post in this.)

Since Lore and I are hoping to grow our guild, The Revellers on Permafrost, I think I’m going to try and use this realization to craft our recruiting message to be something other than the standard “friendly, casual, group of friends” message that most casual guilds such as ours end up with.

So if you’re looking for a guild on Permafrost that’s more like popping in to your local pub than clocking in to your second job. Where you can find someone that can help you with your tradeskill questions or put together a group to help you finish off that heritage quest that’s been in your journal for months or just find someone to chat with while you run around harvesting/soloing. In short a place “Where everybody knows your name…” (NORM! – and if you get that you’re probably around the average age of the guild). Check out The Revellers either at our website or in game.

Last Wednesday SoE surprised everyone with the rollout of GU48 in EQ2. We knew it was coming but everyone figured it would either be later in the week what with Fan Faire taking everyone’s time and energy the previous weekend. This update added a ton of content that Lore and I were looking forward to so Comcast deciding to help us celebrate the release by having our internet connection drop off was NOT appreciated.

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Spore is one of those games I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.   It has a ‘god game’ aspect with initially creating your creature and having it evolve.  Eventually it will hit the city builder stage (a gamestyle I enjoy) and then the Civ-game, which is also a gamestyle I enjoy.  Finally your creations venture off into space, in what I assume will be Gal Civ-like 4X game.

What makes it unique is that, while a single-player game, it will populate your world with the creatures of others, lending it a multiplayer aspect.   The creature creator itself was released earlier this summer, and I spent some time playing with it.  I don’t know how practical in-game any of my critters will prove, nor do I know how any of the ones I downloaded to my creator will be.  It’s nifty though how easily you can take someone else’s creature into your game.   The intent is to have creature-casts as well as buddy (and ignore) lists.   It launches in one week, and I’m excited to see how it plays out!

Last night we had originally planned to spend a leisurely evening killing some storms but Lore’s new Mystic, Crystalshade, was still in Sundered Splitpaw and she needed one more quest to get the glowing shard that would allow her to teleport back. So I started the storm killing with Klubya while she headed in to try and complete the solo quest in the Arena. Unfortunately, she’s never been a great soloer and hasn’t really gotten a handle on the Mystic yet so she was unable to take down the multiple encounter.

After killing off one last storm Klubya gated back and we decided to tackle the hideout mission again since it was the quickest that we had done. This basically involves going into an instance, slaughtering gnolls – any day you can slaughter gnolls is a good day as for as Klubya is concerned – then using the ever present explosive barrels to blow up their supplies. 30 minutes later we had blown up the last of their supply crates, woot, done lets get out of here…oh wait, it didn’t count for her shard?!?.

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If I’m going to start posting more about my adventures in the various games I guess I should give a quick rundown of my various characters.

Everquest 1:

Bjoern – Level 30ish Dwarven Berserker created to play with the Tuesday night Nostagia group. No last name yet but I’m thinking of something like Ta’Rock.

Soaridor – Level 53 Drakin Mage created to check out the new race and, due to the increased speed of leveling, ended up joining the Friday night Nostalgia group. Currently replaced by Sisca but I may start alternating depending on the needs of the group.

Sisca Mainacier – Level 56 Human Monk, this was my original character in EQ, created back in October of 1999. I recently moved him over from The Tribunal when Nostalgia was working on Vox/Naggy. While I thought the tactic we came up with for Mage pulling Naggy was cool – basically the druid would cast her translocate spell on Soaridor and I’d run in and aggro the lair and get them to just outside then accept the TL to clear agro then gate back to the where I had bound just outside the throne room – I thought having a monk around would be more efficient. Besides, Sisca was still 51 since I’d held him there for the express purpose of pulling Vox. Got him to 56 so far but after the trip to Old Sebilis last week I’m thinking that depending on who’s available and where we go Soaridor’s DPS might be more beneficial at times so I may start platooning them.

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I rolled my warrior, Loredena, on the Tribunal on 9/1/99. A coworker had convinced me to play EQ by telling me ‘it’s D&D online!’. Despite a confusing UI, corpse-runs, blind Barbarian in Halas and everything else that went with a new online game, I was immediately enthralled. While Lore was my much-loved main, played most days, I rolled up other avatars to play with friends. With Traveller (my coworker) and his friend Nine, I played a dwarven cleric named Serenya on Sunday afternoons, eventually joined by Sisca with his wizard.With Traveller, Nine’s sister Bobaloo, and their friend Hammey, I rolled a different dwarven cleric named Velma (on Fennin Ro) to play one night a week as part of the Scooby group (we had Daphyne, HE enchanter; Scrapy, dwarf warrior; Scooby, WE druid; Shaggey, barb shaman; and Phreadd, human paladin)

By the time we stopped playing six years later, Serenya was 65, Loredena was 55, and Velma was 52 – we had moved Scooby group to the Trib, and I switched to playing Serenya with them. While Lore wasn’t played as much, those two once-a-week groups were still going strong, right up until the end.

In the years since, I would occasionally log in just to look around, but I never tried to play. Until this spring.I have been reading the blogs of Tipa and Stargrace for awhile, and they began writing about EQ Nostalgia.From their posts and the ensuing wave of nostalgia a new guild was born, Nostalgia on the Luclin server, and Sisca and I decided we wanted to be a part of that.

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Last night I spent some time making sure all of my various alt’s in WoW have emptied their mailboxes in preparation for canceling my account.

Around May I started to get bored, as did Lore I think, and we sort of put the group on hold for awhile. Both Lore and I have hunters that are at 67 and the temptation is there to make that last push to 70 but she said she just couldn’t muster the energy and she has a much higher tolerance for these things than I do – every time I consider it my head starts hurting.

So today it ends.

I may be back at some point but I have to say that nothing I’ve seen coming out of WotLK is making me think that will be what brings me back.