mellicious | Guilds and GuildWars (Reply)

Tombs of the Primeval Kings
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Now that I've gotten all the introductory bits out of the way and I'm not quite as worried about my mother as I have been, I guess I can now go back to writing "normal" entries and go on about GuildWars and other mundane things. I haven't talked about GuildWars in a while, have I?

Well, maybe I should go a little introductory for this, too. The thing is, I am not a person who has always played games like this - I was never a D&D player or a World of Warcraft player or any of those things. I guess I sort of snuck in the side door, from Kingdom of Loathing, which uses a lot of bits and pieces from MMORPGs but is web-based. I was tempted to try WoW when columbina was playing it, but I had an several-year-old computer at the time and I was pretty sure that wouldn’t work. Then Col switched to GuildWars and I got a new computer, and the temptation got a lot greater. It took me a few months, but when GW had the preview weekend for the new game (at the time) - Factions - I tried it out. We thought I would probably have to get a new video card, but it worked fine without it, and I was hooked. I bought the original game, Prophecies, and started playing the next week. That was at the end of March, so I’ve been playing for over eight months now. I bought Factions in July, I think, and then when Nightfall was announced, I pre-ordered it immediately. Col and I play together if we’re both on, usually, and if he’s not I play by myself or sometimes with guild-mates. Hi, my name is Mel, I am an addict.

Nightfall has been out for over a month now and we are starting to make some progress in it. My paragon Inaya and Col's elementalist Hecuba, who have been playing together since the beginning, are now in Vabbi, the third big area in the game. They are apparently on the verge of catching up with Col's paragon Imri, who is stuck on a mission she can't get through. (Very frustrating, that.) We have also been playing Col's dervish (named Elasah) with my ranger (Mila) - they are still on the "starter" island of Istan but they are getting close to the end of the quests there. And then my dervish, Sharzad, has mostly been playing by herself, and she is in between those two groups progress-wise - she is working on the first mainland area, which is called Kourna. All of those characters are ones we created in Nightfall; then there are also the ones from the older games, which you can bring over from one game to the other (assuming you have bought all of them), and both of us have been working on that some as well. None of my older characters have gotten very far in Nightfall so far, mostly because I've been playing them in a very scattershot way. Col's mesmer Kaeleen seems to be doing better, though, I gather.

We changed guilds, from TOG Guild #1 (which is just called The Older Gamers) to the new guild, officially named Templars of Older Gamers but which mostly seems to get called guild #3. (Guild #2 has historically been the Europeans and Australians but is now mostly Australians, and the Europeans are moving with us to the new guild.) It's really more of a paper change than anything else, since all three guilds are in an alliance and most people just talk on Alliance Chat where everybody in all the guilds can see it. They split loosely down time-zone lines and we were sort of right on the line. The new guild is supposed to be the US Eastern Time zone and Europe. Col is in Eastern and I am one zone over from that, in Central, but since we play together so much we thought we should stay in the same guild, whichever one it was, and I said I didn't mind switching. It still seems a little weird, since a lot of the people that we are particularly friendly with are still in guild #1, but like I said, it doesn't really matter. And since we (guild 1, technically, but really the whole group) were featured as the official GuildWars Guild of the Week a couple of weeks ago, we have gotten a lot of new members in all three guilds.

The picture is from an area called Tombs of the Primeval Kings, in Prophecies. It's sort of an elite area - meaning it's really hard! I had never gone into it at all until the guild had an event Thanksgiving weekend and took groups to play. We never finished, but it was a lot of fun. There are four areas; this picture was in the 4th area, but we died right after I took the screenshot. (Maybe it was bad luck, because this was the only one I thought to take.)