My Gaming Career

My career as a gamer is probably more impressive than my real life.  After all, I've saved virtual worlds dozens of times and taken on mythic beasts - even if everyone is doing it, I add my own spin.

In the beginning, we had a Linkshell in FFXI - here we are choosing teams for a Zilart mission.  Scandi and I are the leaders.

This is what getting naked and going to a bar looks like in FFXI.  We were either celebrating that I was quitting or that I came back after quitting.

I led alliance events through Zilart content in FFXI and bested the creepy Promyvion denizens at the hearts of the teleportation crags.  I went to Selbina before there was storage there - back when you had to carry everything.  There was intense, original lore which made me wonder just how much fun it would have been if I'd started playing it a year or two earlier - or if the Americas had been able to play when the Japanese were first able.  It was too regionally variant to really get me because, although I played it for ages, it just never seemed fair that Japanese players had a stranglehold on the economy and had less server lag than everyone else - this was jokingly referred to as the "JP Button" (JP was the in-game Romanji language code for Japanese).

I still talk to these people.  They don't look like this in real life.

I recall having fun international Linkshells (guilds) with a lot of British and Canadian members and making some very awesome friends who carried over into real life.

Yes, this is a bunch of Alliance toons in a Horde-only district in WoW.  I figured out how to get in by exploiting game mechanics and invited my whole guild.  That is a real Dranei on that fancy Horde throne.

I played World of Warcraft when Lich King first came out and blasted to 60 in a week or two.  I was one of those who, coming from other MMOs, didn't take it seriously and got bored by the equipment-centered gameplay because a lot of the lore was recognizably recycled from Warcraft 2 which I played in my younger days with my brother (and even 3 which I didn't play but watched my husband play).  Incidentally, I played this with the same people who I played FFXI with.

I played Guild Wars (Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall and Eye of the North - still finishing Beyond) which was wasn't the MMO as we tend to think of it and placed less stress on grouping and had intense, original lore in bite sized chunks so you didn't need to play for 20 hours and it wasn't subscription based so you didn't feel obliged to "get your money's worth" by ruining your life.  I played this with people my husband knew and with a dear friend from my FFXI and WoW days and met a few more awesome people despite the lack of social emphasis.

Ghost Suzaku (Lili) and Melantha.  No, we're not cold at all.  Thank you for asking.

For some reason, you can't jump off a cliff.  I've been trying for years.

I played EVE Online which, while less in the storyline department, was highly player-driven and had a real, working economy.  They've been evolving actively from "stock market in space" with nothing but a nice little pilot's license photo to make you different from the thousands of other Iteron V pilots to having actual environments inside of space stations which fully rendered avatars can run and walk around.  They're even coming out with Dust 514 which should be planet-based and more of a shooter from my understanding.  Dust players would be interacting with EVE players and the shifts in EVE versions and graphical updates are definitely making making all ready for this.

The flat "DMV style" character representation from yesteryear (2008?):  The DMV in Space obviously hadn't learned how to make people smile yet either.

The market in this game is not some artificial thing which devs threw together, but something which flows like the real world.  Oh, and rules...so long as you didn't mod, hack or sell in-game items or currency for actual real-world cash, you weren't violating anything.  Yes, you could spend two years stalking or infiltrating and then murder/steal/destroy everything not nailed down which a person let you near.  Ultimately it was their fault for trusting that you wouldn't stab them in the back.  I'm sure that a few months of actively playing EVE will teach you more than a BBA (I've helped Business students with their homework) about how business really works.

I played FFXIV in Beta and for a couple months after launch (prior to the overhaul) and liked the intent but not the execution - I felt that it was both doing something innovative and converging with Guild Wars to the extent that they were making "bite sized" pieces of lore and adventure which you could easily pick up, execute and go about your real life.

It was a really fun Beta too - I remember we sort of had an "end of the world" party when they pulled the plug although Square Enix didn't have an official event and my Linkshell (guild) ran cross-continent to see some nice scenery way out of our level range before we "died" and our Beta characters got their data wiped.

I've also dabbled with things like Champions, PWO and others in different phases of their lives.  My goal is to jump off a cliff in every game which permits it - or a bridge.  I am much happier if I got "splat" than not.
For the record:
Final Fantasy XI - jumped off a cliff, landed in another part of the zone without damage.
Guild Wars - tried to jump off a cliff, wasn't able to.
World of Warcraft - you can not only jump off cliffs and mountains but floating cities in the sky.  You can also dismount from your flier in mid-air.  Splattering results but the death penalty is obnoxious (having to run/fly back as a spirit).
 EVE - You're in space, there ARE NOT CLIFFS.
Final Fantasy XIV - Not enough data.  The only times that I found likely cliffs, there wasn't anyone tolerant of my antics present so I didn't risk it.
Guild Wars 2 (Beta Weekend) - I have died from jumping off of a bridge maybe ten real-world feet above ground.  You can jump off almost anything.  Since I tried this during the BWE I'm not bound by NDA.  You will break your gear by killing your character like this but you just need to think a little harder about where you're doing it - keep a repair NPC nearby.