kansalis.com

After a few unsuccessful attempts in the past at starting a blog, I thought maybe it was time to try again! I’d like to keep at least a reasonable amount of blog traffic here, as it’s something I’ve meant to do for a long time but never quite got around to it… I think I’ll start with a brief rundown of how I got into online gaming & MMOs, and how I ended up abck playing WoW again.

I first started playing multiplayer games back with Doom2, Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer on the dialup Multiplay BBS, where I was a CoSysop on the system. It all went downhill from there really! As soon as the first “tenner a month” dialup internet connections were available from Demon Internet, I was all over it. Playing games like Warcraft 2 over an internet connection with 3 other people was my idea of heaven.

In September 1997 I signed up my first account for Ultima Online. It was pretty much the only game I played for the next 6 years, by which time I had 7 active accounts (yes, seven). I was now oficially an MMO addict…! I lived through 4 seperate expansions and additional landmasses in the game and owned a huge array of prime-location houses and ultra-rare items in the game.

November 2003 saw the realease of Star Wars Galaxies and drew me squarely away from the high fantasy of UO and into the futuristic world of Jedi & Lightsabers. Within a week or so of wandering around aimlessly in SWG, I stumbled upon a group of Shadow Knights who were in the middle of setting up their guild and planning an area to place their group of houses (there were no player cities at this point). Having been nice enough to invite me to the guild, I settled in nicely with a great bunch of people to play the game with. When Player Cities went live, myself and Bearclaw stayed up through the night to build our City Hall and place it where we wanted to on Naboo. Unfortunately we were too late because of the horrendous lag and server-crashes and the planet was full. Eventually we decided to all move our houses and factories to Dantooine, and so Shadowstone was born. Unfortunately SoE decided to completely wreck the game with their “Combat Upgrade”, which fundamentally changed the whole experience. Sadly I was so unimpressed with the whole thing I decided to leave the game (along with a large proportion of SK).
I took a break from online gaming for a while, but eventually found my way into WoW to join SK again in an online game. I spent some time playing and raiding as a Priest, but didn’t really find WoW had any long term appeal for me, so I closed my account and went back to my Xbox 360 for a while.

AoC looked like an amazing game when it was first released, so I joined up with some old SK friends to start up a guild in another new game. Unfortunately AoC didn’t have any long-term appeal either, so it quickly died for SK.
Warhammer kind of went the same way as AoC for SK. Some of us hit the game hard for a while but burnt out fairly fast. After a brief casual spat with some other games like Free Realms & Champions Online I became a little disillusioned with MMOs in general and once again returned to Call of Duty on my Xbox, with a bit of casual “social” gaming on the PC.

In between all of that, I tend to apply for random betas when I see them crop up and have had access to the betas for most of the prime new MMOs over the years. One of the first for me was the original first wave of WoW beta access. I hated the ‘cartoony’ look & feel of the game then, so pretty much dismissed it as an option and stuck with SWG. Having played easily 10+ other MMOs since then, I’ve realized that very few of them have the level of depth and variety that WoW players now take for granted.

So now I’m back with WoW. The priest I used to raid with actually belonged to a guildmate and has been rested at level 70 since I quit. I’ve decided to work on my own characters again and as of right now my main couple are a BM Hunter at level 66 and a Resto Druid at level 36. I’ll probably split my playtime equally over those two so I don’t burn out on one or the other.

So much for my “brief” rundown. I’ll sign off for now & get back to setting up Wordpress!