Feel free to skip ahead to the review if you wish, but I figured I’d give you an explanation as to how I came to TERA, or came back as it were.

I’m pretty sure in my last post, “How Did I Get Here“, I mentioned that I was going to pre-order a copy of TERA for the Open Beta access this past weekend. My goal, per a friend’s suggestion, was to give the game a second chance. I had played it in Closed Beta 3 or so and found it lacking. I think I gave it maybe a thirty minute shot before I had completely dismissed it as “another one of those Korean MMO’s” and went on my way back to World of Warcraft (which I was playing at the time).

From a thirty minute standpoint the things I noticed immediately were the fact that the voice overs were dubbed in English and did not match up to the cutscene characters, the colors which are vibrant looked horrifically cartoony and the Elin were a pedophiles wet dream. Small, child-like characters who as usual have their undies showing. I thought to myself, this is seriously a free to play game waiting to happen. -Exit-

I really never gave the game another thought, except in passing during a phone conversation with a friend of mine two weeks ago. I told him not to bother that it looked like another Korean grinder. Several days later a friend, Nysom, who was feeling the same way, but too was burnt on every other MMO out there, said she was going to give it a second chance in open beta and that I ought to get a free pre-order from Amazon and give it another go. So I did, where’s the harm?

I was pretty excited when Early Character Creation began and I got back in and created one of those Elin (the child-like characters – I prefer playing smaller races) and hit “play”. Darn, the game was not accessible for another five or so days. I’m not a patient person, I never have been. Waiting those five or so days felt like forever.

The Review

Prologue

When open beta finally hit, I immersed myself in the new prologue they had added between closed beta 5 and open beta access. I can honestly say I’m not a huge fan of this particular prologue choice. The prologue itself is engaging and I enjoyed it, however I felt overwhelmed as a new player to the game. They start your character off at level 20 with a huge array of skills to work with. Every so often you get a popup message telling you to read over your skills because you’re about to engage in battle. It didn’t seem to matter how much of my skills I read, I was still confused about how the combat system even worked and I had no idea what I was doing at all.

The story line however was really well done. I enjoyed the scenery and trying to figure out what to do and where to go next. It definitely got me into the game with all the action going on and by the time I had ‘died’ (scripted death) I was sucked into the world of Arborea.

The Isle of Dawn

I found it rather amusing that they chose the name above for the Isle of Dawn, simply because it reminds me very much of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and their starting zone. This of course is completely unimportant, but I thought I’d mention it.

The Isle of Dawn was actually a lot of fun as it turns out. This was where you actually began in CBT3 (the one I bailed on). The beginning of it is exactly the same as what I had played before but for some reason I had decided that it felt different to me, or maybe I was different. I came to realize that after 40 MMO’s that I was burnt on playing World of Warcraft and it’s cardboard cutout predecessors (though it’s not to say that I won’t revisit them in the future – I have an addiction you know) and I wanted to play something that felt different.

You get to around level 11 on the isle, there is no PvP in this area if you’re on a PvP server and it gives you a nice introduction as to how the game is going to play out as you progress. It’s very easy to solo your way through it to the end, where you will probably need to group up with another person or two to defeat the BAM (big ass monster) at the end. Some classes, if careful (like the Slayer), can solo it but they have to be very smart about how the pursue it.

Combat

The combat in this game is actually really cool. You have a cross hair that you place over a mob or person in order to target them and then you cast your spells/attacks. I’m not sure whether it really requires much skill in order to use, but it does require you have a good ping to the server because lag will royally screw you up. Some of the skills you get, such as healing skills, will actually log onto a target and heal that target and sometimes others allies around you.

PvP

The PvP has been absolutely awesome. Currently there are no battlegrounds in the game, those are slated for late summer which is depressing to me honestly because I fear for open world PvP. It’s one of the biggest selling points to this game for me and several of my friends and if battlegrounds take that away from the game like it did for World of Warcraft, they’ll lose a lot of us for sure. En Masse/Bluehole is going to have to come up with some incentives for both battlegrounds and open world PvP in order to keep it flowing.

Currently, however and depending of course on your channel (I’ll touch on those shortly) it can be a gankfest and actually that’s pretty fun. When a person goes “red” or “outlaw” they are PvP-enabled and are free to kill any player they see fit (or at the very least, try to do so). If you’re on a PvP server you’re always enabled to be ganked but not to attack others unless you chose to do so, of course if someone attacks you, you can attack back.

The best PvP moment for me in the game was while I was out and about in Fey Forest trying to kill some little red santa-looking guys. This Castanic came out of no where and started attacking me. When she realized that she wasn’t going to win easily, she began to train monsters on me. My adreneline was so high and I was trying so hard to win. Those mobs were kicking my butt, there were like 20 of them on me. After several minutes of fighting and teleporting all over the damn place (I’m a Mystic and we can teleport – sort of similar to Mage’s Blink in WoW) I wound up kicking her ass, the mobs asses and I won. It was the single most thrilling moment in the whole of beta for me.

At one point while near the exit of Crescentia a few guys from a guild I can’t remember the name of, start ganking and camping me. I told my guild what was going on and before I knew it we had a little war going on with this guild. There were about five of us on both sides and even though I probably died a dozen times, it was such a blast to have this fight going down.

All-in-all I look forward to more fights and such like these. I had so much fun this weekend with this beta. It reminded me of the days back in Lineage II where my husband, friends and I were camping a bunch of gold farmers and other people. My husband loves to ‘go red’ and kill people. Those were the days and it feels like they’re back!

Channels

Just wanted to make a quick mention of channels. There are different channels in the game which you can choose between. Channel 1 is always full of people, same with Channel 2 for the most part. As you get higher in numbers, there are less people in that instance.

People have been complaining endlessly about the channels and I just wanted to make a point of mentioning that En Masse has said that they are temporary for release and the higher level you get, the more they aren’t there. They just wanted to make sure everyone was spread out enough in order to get mobs and such.

The downside however, to channels, is the fact that people can flee PvP using them and that’s a pain in the butt. I look forward to their removal in the coming months, personally.

Leveling

Leveling is pretty much on target with any other MMO on the market today. You have the choice to either do quests or grind on mobs (though it’s recommended that you do the red story line quests for the armor). There really isn’t a whole lot to tell you about here because it’s just so similar to everything else out there on this point.

Special Shout Out

<Enigma>

I just want to also mention my guild while I’m writing this because without them I don’t know if I would have enjoyed the game as much as I did. My friend Azmyth and I kind of floated around the first day or two looking for an RPvPvE guild to join but we couldn’t find much of any interest. We had both written posts looking for a home but nothing jumped out at us until Viesj wrote on my post about his guild <Enigma>.

It sounded like exactly what we were looking for and it has worked out perfectly!

Everyone in the guild is really nice and active. We generally have 30-50% of our guild roster on at any time and they’re always up for doing anything whether it be dungeons, questing, pvp, it doesn’t matter.

It’s really important to have a guild that you like and trust in this particular game. We have a wonderful community among  ourselves and actually the server at large and when push comes to shove and you’re in the middle of a giant PvP battle, it’s nice to know that there are friends to watch your back!

I’m looking forward to continue playing with them this Saturday for pre-order headstart.

Enigma Guild Website

<Orlerae>

I wanted to mention Orlerae, my friend Nysom’s guild on the Serpentis Isle server which is a PvE server for those who have no interest in major PvP. She’s a great friend of mine and I am very sad that I’m not playing with her and her crew but I love PvP and danger too much which is why I’m over on Basilisk Crag. That being said, she’s a great person who knows how to run a guild very well and they seem to be having a blast over there as well. So if you’re not interested in PvP and just want to PvE you ought to check them out!

Orlerae Guild Website

All-in-All

I have really been enjoying this game. I’m so thankful that I gave it another look. I’m sure I’ve left a crap ton out of my review because I’m really good at that, but I can tell you that you should probably give it a try when the free trial comes out. It may look like another free-to-play game or Korean grinder, but it doesn’t feel that way when you really start getting into it.

My husband and I just moved into our first “real” home. We moved out of my uncles duplex where we had three rooms (cubicles really) to a new house (my old house) boasting three (four if you count what became an office later) bedrooms, a large kitchen, living room, reading nook, porch and an acre of land. It took us roughly a week to move everything over to the new house from the duplex and now we’re in the middle of a bathroom remodel. It has been a crazy two weeks so far and during this period of time, I personally, forgot that I even had a World of Warcraft subscription. I forgot about gaming altogether. I was so busy with house stuff that I had just kind of moved on. To top it off, we got ourselves a new puppy named Zoey! She has been eating up my time left and right, trying to train her to do normal dog things and leashless training in the backyard. She’s been a hoot and while it didn’t start off well with Otto it has gotten considerably better over the last week or so and now they’re damn near inseparable.

Things have been going well.

I realized today when I was outside that I felt kind of like I was in a dream. I went from this house in the city, to a house in the suburbs where there is actually room and it was then, as I gazed out over our big backyard, that I realized I had actually accomplished a dream or a goal (whatever you want to call it). Justin and I had discussed moving to a place like this for years but we didn’t think it was going to happen until we were in at least our 30′s to 40′s. But here I am, two weeks away from 26 years old, and we’re living our dream!

See House Pictures Here

I digress, I’ll get back to the original point here. So after having forgotten about World of Warcraft over the last two weeks, I started having these strange desires to go back to Vanguard. I’ve always loved Vanguard, it holds a special place in my heart and it always will. I had a bit of an issue subscribing because the Vanguard website is so awful and so outdated that I swear they do not have a link to manage your account anywhere on it! Every link I could find would take me to my EverQuest 2 account information, which I thought actually had my Vanguard information linked in it, but it did not. So I had to contact support and after an hour (apparently they were swamped) they finally gave me a link to the account page. I asked if they were planning on redoing the website for the Free 2 Play launch this summer and the guy said he had no clue, but that every other F2P launch had had a new websites designed for them, so he didn’t think this would be any different.

When I finally had my sub going, I hopped on into the world of Telon for the first time since 2010 or so (I thought I had played more recently, but all of my quests were from 2010). Splinki Glixx is my Goblin’s name and she is one of the coolest looking characters I have in any of the 40+ MMO’s I’ve played. I absolutely love Vanguard’s goblin character model for women, they’re awesome. I ran around for a while and killed things when I saw them, trying to relearn the monk class. My quest told me that I needed to kill a bunch of turtles for turtle meat.  Once I figured out how to get where I needed to go I rented a griffon and … holy crap that thing was unbearably slow! You only have three minutes of flight and I felt like I could have run to my location faster than that! Eventually, after what felt like forever I got to my destination. The turtles were a pain in the butt to kill and that is putting it mildly. They weren’t hard to kill themselves, they were hard to attack because they’re in water and the water in Vanguard moves at such a crazy speed and your character moves with it. Every time I got in the water, I’d fly right on past my targets!

Well, I tried to keep playing but after a while I just kind of felt a tad hopeless for some reason. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that all of my friends are off playing other games at the moment, no one seems solid on any game because they know that TERA, Diablo III, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are all around the corner and they want to play those, so they’re just kind of floating around.

So after getting considerably annoyed at my recent sub to Vanguard, I wound up back over at MMORPG.com weighing my options. I’ve played everything. Nothing stuck out, nothing was new or interesting, not a single thing. I’ve pretty much burned all of my bridges, killed off all of my trolls and found myself bored to death.

So this is how I wound up at Aion. I hadn’t played it since November or so of 2009. It’s been a great distraction the past two days and I’m hoping that it will last me until May 1st which is the launch of TERA.

Until two days ago, I had no interest in TERA. I had played the closed beta some and found it to be a pedophiles wet dream. The Elin, my race, are tiny little kids with animal ears/tails and short dresses. They can only be female. I assume their male counterparts are the Poporis, which I am horribly disappointed in, because they cannot be female. These are furry creatures such as badgers and raccoon. You can pretty much set them up the way you want them to look. It has a decent character creation interface. It could be better but it could be so much worse.

The combat was interesting to say the least. It’s apparently a very action-packed game. I admittedly, did not give it enough of a chance. My friend Jill and a bunch of her friends are going to play it, I don’t have a whole lot of other games going for me at the moment, so I figure my birthday is coming up and I’m buying myself a birthday present. Yipee! It’s not Guild Wars 2, but hopefully it will tide me over for a little bit and it will be nice to play with such a big group of people.

Well, it looks like it’s time to end this and head back onto Aion for a while. Aion has changed so much since 2009 that it almost feels like an entirely new game. They’ve added a housing & pet system which have been pretty cool and to be honest I forgot most of the other parts of the game, so it feels relatively new to me. I can’t really touch on most of the points of the game seeing as I’ve only been playing it for about a day and a half, but I can say that since it’s completely free to play, as in not even an option to sub, it’s worth giving it another look and keeping it on standby. Hopefully they don’t add items to their cash shop that ruin the game, and if they

I figured since I was going to take the time to trial the game, I would at least write what I’ve noticed and what the SoR is all about.

For the SoR Giver

Once your friend accepts the scrolls and pays for at least 30 days of game time, you unlock your choice of the following rewards:

A Free Spectral Gryphon – for an Alliance character

A Free Spectral Wind Rider – for a Horde character

For the SoR Receiver

• A single character immediately boosted all the way to level 80.
• A FREE upgrade to Cataclysm – regardless of the box level
• An optional FREE character move – to the SoR giver’s realm/faction
• 7 FREE days of game time – available immediately

It’s actually an pretty great move if people have been gone from the game anytime prior to March 4th. Unfortunately the person giving the SoR doesn’t really receive anything nearly as awesome in my opinion. It would be nice if they got something out of it more than just another mount, but at least they have the potential to play with another friend!

Justin and I have both decided to trial the game for seven days while I’m away watching my mother’s dogs (she’s evil for being in Turks & Caicos). It will be nice to have something to play with him again!

As of right now, I have yet to choose a character. Hopefully I’ll have one all picked out by the end of the night. I didn’t get to play yesterday because of St. Patrick’s Day and I’ve barely had the time today since I had to move this beast of a machine up to my moms for the week.

As soon as I have some more content, I’ll do a post on my actual character. I’m not sure yet if I want to use the level 80 thing or whether I want to experience all the new content they’ve added to the game with Cataclysm. I didn’t really play a whole lot of it. I do know that I’m a little excited about the Mists of Pandaria thing. Monks in other games are typically my favorite class and I don’t mind being a big, cuddly teddy bear!

In just a few hours the NDA for the expansion is to be removed and I think we’ll probably hear some interesting things after that, so maybe I’ll add that in my next post as well.

Ankama has created a game that I am just hooked to, as if it were an IV. I’ve been playing it non-stop since it launched and I’m not bored yet! This might be a record!

After a week of floundering between many different classes (as in, all of them) I have finally settled on Enutrof, which is essentially a treasure hunter and it is definitely working out wonderfully. I find that I have “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” syndrome. I played damn near every class to level 10, sometimes two or three times even if I wasn’t interested in the class, simply because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I must have remade my character over 100 times. Finally I asked Justin what he thought I should do and he told me to stick with the Enutrof. Of course, I didn’t listen and kept floundering, until one day we were at his doctor’s office in the waiting room and it was then that I decided and announced to him, “I think I’m just going to remake the Enutrof and stick to that when I get home.” He smirked and said, “Good idea.”

I must totally drive this guy crazy. Seriously.

Well, it’s been working out ever since I made that grand decision and I’m glad I’ve finally stuck to something because it has allowed me to actually move forward in the game.

I spent sometime guild hopping like an ass. I know how much guilds hate that but sometimes the fit just isn’t right! They were nice people, just not what I was looking for. After a bit of looking around and discovering the Amakna nation website, I finally decided to join RareHunters, the leader of which is also the vice-governor of our nation, Cassidy. So far, it’s a great fit. The people have been very nice and accommodating all of my noob questions. Most seem to have played the beta, which I decided to avoid so that I would not burn myself out prior to launch and so that everything was fresh, new, and completely confusing.

There is no denying that last part, this game has a lot going on and a lot of it can be very daunting and confusing for a new player. But that is half the fun! These days all MMO’s that have been coming down the pipeline are generally copies of World of Warcraft, more often than not their either designed to try and hide that fact or they just put it out there blatantly and hope that they can make a buck or two before people get bored and move on. So far, nothing in the past few years has really been “new”. Wakfu is. It’s even different from it’s predecessor Dofus.

Now is the time that I’m going to update on my character. Any Wakfu post from now on will probably have the following information in it, so I can keep track of what I’m doing and so you can laugh at how far I’ve not come.

As many of you know, if you have more than a few of my articles on here, I am in love with isometric-view games. I always have been and as long as they keep making them, I will keep loving them. This game just brings back to so much nostalgia from my early MMO days.

The game seems relatively top notch and that’s how it should be, really. They’ve already swam in this well for the last 6-7 years with Dofus, so they do have experience with it (Ankama that is, Square Enix is just the publisher). However, there are a few things I wish they had learned from their Dofus foray and had made available, early on, in Wakfu.

The game currently needs the following:

More Storage Options (Taken from my post here)

Haven Bag

• Allow more space in our Haven Bags. While I know that it’s possible to unlock more, I am a bit confused as to why there are only five slots in the chest to start with and so far I have found no way to increase the first page worth of space.

Tool Belt

• We have all these tools for crafting and gathering and they take up gargantuan amounts of space in our inventory. We have such a small amount of inventory as is and so many things to pick up and store for crafting. Can we please have a tool belt to store all of our tools in?

Pet Cage / Roaming

• Clearly we’re going to amass multiple pets over time. I would like there to be a place to store all of these pets. They’re all useful in different situations since they have different stats and such. I don’t want to kill them off. I’d rather have a cage or something to house them in.
• Or could we have a way to let them wander around our Haven Bags, as housing items, until we decide we need them in battle?

Inventory Tabs

• Perhaps we could have the option, since items are already separated via tabs, the ability to have separate bags per each tab. Not only would this move Kama’s around more in the community as people would want/need to buy more bags, but it would also give us the opportunity to have more storage for our items and easier to manage/organize.

Passport

• Please make this a consumable object that turns into a button elsewhere. Having it take up inventory space is a bit silly.

Cosmetic Storage

• There are TONS of items in this game. People love to look different from one and other and it would be nice if we could store our cosmetic items, both from the cash shop and found in game, in a specific chest or something in our Haven Bags.

Other Items of Discussion

Mail System

• There currently isn’t one. So not only can you not send friends mail or items, you can’t mail your alts anything.

No Ability to Transfer Items

• I touched on this above, but aside from trading the items to a friend (or worse, a stranger) there is no way to transfer items to any of your characters. This does not bode well for subscription items.

Respec

•  There is currently no respeccing in the game. The game is built on a point system, where you, yourself, put points into different skills and abilities but with no way of respeccing it is dangerous if you accidentally put the point elsewhere. I also have no idea if they will return these points to you after an update to a skill (I hope so).

These are just a few of the things I’ve noticed while playing the game. They are not game breaking and they are not deal breakers for this game, necessarily (well maybe the bag space – we really do need more) but these are things that I feel the dev team should think about.

It reminds me a lot of Dark Ages, which was my first MMO back in 2002 (and I miss it dearly).

The game has the following:

12 classes: Cra, Ecaflip, Eniripsa, Enutrof, Feca, Iop, Osamodas, Pandawa, Sacrier, Sadida, Sram & Xelor.

6 Gathering Professions: Farmer, Fisherman, Herbalist, Lumberjack, Miner and Trapper.

11 Crafting Professions: AoE Weapons Master, Armorer, Baker, Chef, Close Combat Weapons Master, Handyman, Jeweller, Kama Minter, Leather Dealer, Long Distance Weapons Master, and Tailor.

Politics: There are even politics in this game, which is pretty awesome. You gain citizenship points and you can attempt to be elected for one of the following: Guard, Soldier or Governor and actually you have the ability to become a criminal if you have -50 citizenship points.

Ecosystem: But the biggest thing about this game, and what everyone has been raving about, is the fact that there is an ecosystem built into the game and creatures can actually go extinct if players aren’t careful about the way they hunt. You can do three things when you kill a mob. You can kill the mob for just XP, you can kill the mob and collect “seeds” which you can “plant” in order to repopulate the world or you can “skin” the creature for parts which are salable to others or usable in crafting.

Aside from all of this, if you’re bored with other games and/or want a cheap alternative to boredom in general, I recommend trying this game out. It’s very different than any other MMO on the market (aside from Dofus which is its predecessor) so you might find a new game that you’ll really enjoy.

Try the Game for Free!

Sign up for the Beta!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I decided that I’m just going to sub both RIFT and LotRO for the foreseeable future (i.e. until GW2 launches – and since that’s buy to play, probably even after that). I just enjoy so many different things about both of them that it’s really hard to just choose one. In RIFT, I adore my guild and love doing our weekly guild events and in LotRO I also love my “Kinship” (guild), and I love all the server/kinship events that are done on a regular basis (most of which are RP-oriented). I even like my burglar these days, which is saying something because it has taken me a long time to enjoy my burglar.

So as it stands at this moment, I will be posting a general update on my playtime in both games from now on and today is the start of that.

LotRO: Pippadora – Lv. 37 Burglar

This week, I took part in a very long walk to Rivendell from South Bree. There were about fifty of us all together and a lot of the players that came with us were lower level which was nice because it gave them a chance to get all of the “waypoints” between Bree & Rivendell (which is about four or five spots). It was nice to be apart of something big like that again, and to RP along the way with a bunch of people I’ve never met before (and some kinnies).

Also this morning I woke up to a wonderful surprise. Apparently a kinnie named Theromin had inspected me yesterday and found my gear severely lacking (it really was – I haven’t upgraded in ages because I lack money) and he had sent me all new gear (all purples!) and new weapons. It was SO nice of him. All of the jewelry I had on prior was from my early twenties and desperately in need of upgrades. Looks like I’ll be set at least for a little while. So a special thank you shout out to him!

RIFT: Nyin – Lv. 37 Cleric (Duracell Spec)

As for RIFT, this week I took part in another of the Telara’s Last Stand events. I’m starting to get higher level now so it’s becoming more and more fun because I can participate more and rely on everyone else to keep me alive less. That is until we arrive in a 45+ area, and then poor Bes and Izzy have to constantly heal/res me! Haha, but they seem to do it with a smile on their faces!

So, that’s where I’m at right now. I find it amusing that in both games I happen to be level 37, though that is bound to change as I seem to be playing LotRO a bit more than RIFT at the moment. Who  knows what the future holds, guess we’ll see!

I’ve since switched over to HostGator and actually I’m writing this in notepad at the moment because my nameservers are taking absolutely forever to transfer over. Funny enough, I feel like GoDaddy planned for it to go slow, so they could charge me for one more months worth of a sub, but really I know that was just a coincidence.

I’m hoping to have everything back up and running by tomorrow. I was working on a secret project for the Faeblight community, but it’s been so slow that I couldn’t work in a proper amount of time. I’m actually considering holding off and instead using my secret project for Guild Wars 2 instead. I know that that is going to launch sooner rather than later and it would be nice to have it ready for that at launch. It has certainly been a learning experience!

On another note – in Alice’s Gaming News, I am torn between RIFT and LotRO. RIFT is a great game and I absolutely adore my guild as I’ve mentioned in a post or two recently. They’re a group of people that I will stick by whenever they (and I) go to a new game. However, Faeblight’s community has changed and not in a way that I wanted or was expecting. I moved to this server in order to gain a considerable amount of RP. I was told that THIS was THE RP server, prior to all of the other servers becoming “Trial” servers. However, I’ve been here for several months now and I’ve seen maybe two RP-related events the entire time and only had one random person RP with me.

The rest of the game is nice and all, but when I get tired of questing I really like to just hit up a tavern, sit around and listen to people chatter on about random subjects, sometimes getting involved, sometimes not.

This is pretty much why I’m wondering if LotRO is a better fit for me overall. I’m pretty sure I can get groups together on there, maybe not in such as massive scale as Gaiscioch can, but the higher level I get, the more I’m sure I can arrange something. But overall I know that after I grow tired of grinding deeds or questing, I can go off and explore the large expansive world or I can hit up a tavern / inn and enjoy some rich RP with like-minded hobbits.

It’s funny because in years past, while I would always tend to roll on an RP server, I would be very hesitant to get involved in any myself. I guess I’m kind of shy about many things, especially when I don’t feel as though I know the history as well as many people (I’ve only read “The Hobbit”, I’m in the middle of “The Fellowship of the Ring”) so I feel inadaquate. But truthfully, the people I’ve come across in LotRO have been very accomodating and patient.

I love walking through the Shire and seeing the bounders (a kinship) monitoring the goings-ons of the road ahead of them, shouting that they’re patroling the Shire. It just gives a sense of reality, of sorts, to the game.

At the moment I have both games subbed. My husband, who has loathed RIFT since basically day one, decided to give the game a go on my reccommendation, so of course I feel terrible that I’m wavering between the two games. I wish that I could get him into LotRO but he has loathed that one too. He loves the atmosphere, but he doesn’t think it’s a good MMO-fit for him. Maybe I can get him to try that one with me again.

I know the above comes as no surprise for any of you. I am a freak with a very strange addiction. MMORPGs. The worst part of this addiction is that, in addtion to this, I am also the most indecisive person I’ve ever come across in terms of gaming and not only does this upset me, as I can’t seem to get a decent foothold in a game, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to keep up with friends and people get exasperated with me on a regular basis.

Well, I guess it’s time to get back in the game and check stuff out (LotRO). One of these days I’ll choose a damn game and stick with it. But today, is probably not that day.

It’s probably due to the the “Trial Servers”, which were basically just server merges, or maybe it’s because of the new RIFT Lite, which allows anyone to come into the game, at any time, with no game purchase and no subscription and play until level 20 with very few restrictions. Honestly, I don’t know what’s causing it for sure but I know that there isn’t much of it going on out in the world. It’s either being kept strictly to a guild-basis or it’s just non-existent. That being said, I, the one-woman-army, plans to try and remedy this situation with a super secret mission. Only it’s so super secret that even you can’t know about it yet. Just know that, I have an idea and I hope it will work.

Other than the RP though, it’s been a blast. My guild is great and is just filled with wonderful people. It’s really no wonder that it has amassed such a following. They’re even very active outside of the game with various things and I just totally dig that.

On another, non-RIFT-related note, lets get to the topic of GoDaddy and webhosting. So if you have been to my site recently and noticed that it’s crawling (and when I say crawling, I mean 500 Internal Server Errors and what have you), I deeply apologize because so far there is absolutely nothing to be done about it. I have contacted GoDaddy numerous times to try and get them to fix it or move me to another server, and so far they’ve done very little (seemingly) to remedy the problem.

I decided today that it might be time to just move to another host, but alas, even after purchasing space over at HostGator, I was yet again thwarted by the evil demon beast that is GoDaddy. They locked my domains for 60 days so that they couldn’t be moved and said there was no way to unlock them. Pooey. So I had to cancel my HostGator account an hour after creating it simply because I wouldn’t be able to use their service for over a month!

Truth be told, up until this past week, I don’t recall ever having had a problem with GoDaddy, ever. But this past week my sites have been so slow it’s been damn near impossible to work on either of them. I’m hoping that it’s just a fluke and that I’ll be able to continue sticking with them. My account has been active since around 2006/2007 and it would be a shame for me to really have to move on. So I’m hoping that maybe it was meant to be, that HostGator wasn’t for me and fate, yes I believe in fate, was telling me to stick it out. Guess time will tell, but so far it’s still fairly slow.

I hope to get some more, in-depth news to you tomorrow regarding the latest 1.7 patch. I meant to write about that days ago but with all this web crap making me pull my hair out, I pretty much forgot all about it and have played through very little, if any of it. So bear with me as I work my way through this slowness and I’ll try to get some blips about 1.7 posted quickly!

Catch ya on the flip side!