Busy Weekend

Meaghs’ mom and sister were in town for the weekend to attend the Portland Bridal Show.  They stayed with us on Friday and Saturday night and then attended the show most of Saturday prior to a shopping spree at the Lloyd Center mall. 

They spent most of Friday shopping at Washington Square mall and both Meaghan and Mandy managed to find shoes for the wedding.  Woohoo!  I didn’t get to see much of them that night.  I’m starting a new project for my employer and working on the planning and legal stuff for that.  Then I had beers planned with Mark for after work.  I came home a couple of pints for the better!  Fortunately we were still able to share dinner and a few glasses of wine before turning in for the night.  It was nice to get the chance to catch up.  I could tell that Meaghs had a blast shopping with them both; so nice for her to get some girl time to spend checking out all of the stores!

I spent most of Saturday reading about the Apache web server and researching Ruby on Rails.  I decided to take a look at how the open source world lives.  Then on Saturday evening I joined Relentless on a very successful raid through Zul’Aman; I even got a new dagger!

All in all, a pretty cool (if busy) weekend!

High Astromancer Solarian

On our second Relentless raid into The Eye we managed to not only one-shot Void Reaver, but also one-shotted High Astromancer Solarian on what was only our guild’s third attempt.  Pictures to follow tonight when I can get them uploaded from my desktop machine at home.

After killing Astromancer we took a peek at Kael’thas.  We were able to kill his four advisors but the weapons in phase 2 simply tore us apart.  It’s a complicated fight and one that will take quite a bit of practice but for now it was great to make more progress into the tier 5 raids.  Congratulations Relentless on another guild first kill!

Twas the night before patch day

‘Twas the night before patch day, and all through the realm,
Not an item was dropping, not even a helm;
The toons were all resting, asleep in their beds,
with visions of new talents filling their heads.

From two in the morning, till two in the aft,
the Blizzard employees installed their new patch.
They worked and they toiled through bugs and through lags,
trying to roll out the content they had.

But the servers, like beasts, would boot and then fail,
the mobs all evading in Stranglethorn Vale;
and just as the night seemed to proffer despair,
the Azeroth they knew came alive with new flair:

A harbor in Stormwind,
new routes by the sea.
More items to craft,
and a new loading screen!

There was only one job that was yet to be done,
to make it all right when the players did come.
The Blizz guy updated the greeting with glee:
“Happy Patchday to all, please welcome patch three.”

Relentless’ Guild First Kill of Void Reaver

We had a spectacular success this weekend in The Eye.  In only our second attempt on Void Reaver we took him down smoothly.  The Void Reaver fight is basically a big game of dodgeball.  All 25 of your raiders spread out around the circumference of a large circular room.  Throughout the fight, Void Reaver will hurl balls of arcane energy at a couple of raiders at once.  Fortunately he aims at your feet, so if a ball of arcane energy is heading in your direction you move out to the edge of the room, let it land, and then get back in.  Other than that it’s a fairly simply tank and spank.

Click for larger image

Congratulations to all of Relentless!  This is great progression and was a wonderful night both for loot and, more importantly, for fun.  We had two good shots on High Astromancer Solarian but eventually just ran out of time.  We’ll be back next Sunday to progress further, this time with Meaghan leading us into battle.

Kaliyah, Agizett, and Vaelorna (me) all got their T5 shoulder tokens, which turn into Mantle of the Corruptor for me and the Rift Stalker Mantle for both Giz and Kali.  The T5 shoulders are definitely an upgrade over my Merciless Gladiator’s Dreadweave Mantle for raiding, plus it’s just so cool to have the real thing instead of the wellfare arena reward alternative.

Until next week…enjoy your time Solarian.  Relentless are coming for you!

Return to Azeroth

After playing Warcraft for almost a year, it was time for a break.  Meaghan and I hung up our swords and cancelled our accounts.  Our original guild, which had consisted almost exclusively of friends from work had fragmented as people moved on and then finally after we were forced to move to a different server.  After losing several members who were both fun to go around with and friends we saw regularly, some of the fun seemed to die.  Also, the guild was struggling and so a big push emerged to get everyone going again but the side effect of that was that I was left feeling a little burned out.  However, after a few weeks off from playing our MMORPG, Meaghan and I became curious about The Lord of the Rings Online.

Curiosity of course led to near immediate purchase of the software and before long we were busily exploring familiar areas from Ered Luin to Thorin’s Gate.  A friend of ours from Warcraft who lives in San Francisco joined us in LOTRO to make a group of three and for the last few weeks we’ve been having a lot of fun together.  However, such experiences led to a hankering to once again return to Azeroth and so this weekend I reactivated our Warcraft accounts.  I played a little few hours this weekend and both Meaghan and I had a lot of fun going around our old haunts together.  The guild has changed slightly, but several old familiar friends are still there and it was good to talk to them again.

I woke up this morning at 6:15 when my alarm went off and after thirty minutes of Dance Dance Revolution, I headed upstairs to relax for a few minutes in Azeroth before jumping in the shower and starting the morning routine.  Warcraft is really good escapism for me, and its a great way to relax and clear my mind before starting a day.  This mist was low over Shattrath City this morning (the Warcraft world game clock is in real time, so it was dawn there too) and I grabbed a couple of screenshots to share before logging off and getting ready for work.  Then I headed to Zangermarash (with the structures that look like big mushrooms) for a couple more both with my DreadSteed (summoned demonic steed) and Thooghun (a summoned demon pet who acts as an awesome bodyguard).  Thooghun is an enslaved pet who does the brunt of the fighting for me in Azeroth.  Check out the Arcanite Reaper (huge axe) that he uses.  My DreadSteed took forever to get and cost an enormous amount of gold in getting all of the materials necessary to launch an assault on the netherrealms from which you may steal one, but he is worth every moment of it.  Walking around Azeroth sucks, whereas having a flaming armored steed really cuts down on travel time!

Vaelorna is my main character.  She’s a level 63 Human Warlock, demonology spec’d, with specializations in herbalism and alchemy.  Meaghan plays as Maedea, a level 41 Night Elf Rogue who rides on a white spotted Nightsaber called Fangsworth and looks totally awesome.  She’s a complete DPS (damage per second) machine and I can’t wait for her to reach level 58 so we can quest through the Dark Portal in Outworld together.  I’ll try to get some pictures of Maedea and Fangsworth later this week.

It’s good to be back!

The Little People

A few weeks ago, I attended my first World of Warcraft guild meeting for The Little People.  I was invited to join the folk of challenged stature in their quest to vanquish the evil Horde when I first began working at SoftSource back in March of this year.  Since then, I have been playing semi-regularly (no questionable absences whatsoever, no matter what you say Hlokk :)) with the other members on Silverhand.  The last MMORPG I was reasonably absorbed in was Asheron’s Call back in 2001 after I lost interest in Everquest.  I have been part of the massively multiplayer role-playing community since 1996 when a friend of mine introduced me to Aardwolf and to MUDding (multi-user dungeon) in general.  Aardwolf is a text-based MUD that offers a fairly advanced list of features including one of the best NPC questmasters I’ve seen.  Not advanced by any means in terms of its graphical appearance, it has “text prompt” feature with absolutely no attempt at graphical rendition, relying rather on the player’s imagination by rendering everything as text through a telnet client.  The difference that Aardwolf presented to me over the variety of video games I had played over the years was the fact that several thousand other people are also playing in the same game with you at the same time.  Ferociously addictive, do not try playing aardwolf or a MUD in general unless you are decidedly bored with the notion of having spare time during the next half decade.

World of Warcraft has some of the same tenets as a MUD in that you create a character by choosing a race and class to seed your initial attributes and set of available skills before starting out upon a storyline in which you invariably save the world from evil.  You work through a variety of stories in a truly massive area to level up your character by delivering trinkets and whacking various mobs and creatures over the head with a plethora of shiny weaponry.  The biggest difference is the truly amazing graphical presentation that brings the world to life.  Some of the larger battles that involve your group of about five people smashing the snot out of a horde of baddies with all manner of lightning bolts, fireballs, swords, axes, and bludgeonry, can be extremely exciting and very entertaining.  In addition to sharing the concept of quests, guilds, and other D&D facets, it contains and expands upon much of the addictiveness that first sucked me in to playing Aardwolf by working very hard to promote teamwork.  While my attendance on Monday night with the Little People has been unreliable to say the least, Vaelorna (my online character) has now reached level 52 and is hoping to achieve the vaunted 60 before The Burning Crusade is released in mid-January.  The most compelling part of playing WoW has without doubt been membership in The Little People.  Despite having played similar games from the genre for almost ten years I have never before known people I was playing with, nor had the opportunity to play with such dedicated and talented guild-members.  The Little People have been endlessly supportive in helping me progress and be a part of the team despite my oft-displayed ability to endanger success, impede progress, or snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  It makes a huge difference to be playing with friends.

Here are a few photos from the initial guild meeting.  Picture 1 from left to right is Zelavian, Gnaome (our fearless leader), and me.  Picture 2 is of Xanger, Ilurath, Gnaome, Verhutch, Zelavian, Hotcarl, and Shebah all watching a laptop on which Gnaome was showing off a beta version of The Burning Crusade.  Picture 3 is of myself and Hlokk (who took the other photos).  I work with Gnaome and Hlokk and previously worked with Hotcarl before he left.  It was great to finally put faces to the people I’d been slaying dragonkin and wolves with for several months and something I’d love to do again in the future.  Thanks to Brian for sharing these pictures with me and thanks to the rest of the guild for many hours of demon-slaying fun.