We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

I consider myself a pretty boy nerd in real life

Macs. I have mixed feelings about them. Sure, they don’t crash, they’re reliable and painless to use and every interaction is an incredibly slick and lubricated experience right from the moment you remortgage your house to buy one. However, they’re also soulless contraptions that rob you of any sense of individuality or accomplishment (I feel like a champion every time I get my PC to successfully boot and love to throw around expressions like “defrag”, “format” and “Blue Screen Of Death”). Also everything is always prefixed with a lower case “i” and that really bugs me. Oh and they don’t run MMOs. At all.

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"Gee willikers mister, this motorbike sure is fast! I can't wait to reach your love lair!"

So. 8 months after first experiencing World of Warcraft my brother has quit the game. He sent round a rather ranty email to myself and another mutual WoW friend on Saturday detailing his gripes about all of the other inhabitants of Azeroth. Apparently he was fed up of being insulted by random strangers, PUGers who constantly threw “hissy fits”, and people who call you a chicken if you don’t accept their invitation to a dual. After checking that his character wouldn’t be wiped when he unsubscribed (he’s still a noob at heart, bless ‘im), he cancelled his monthly subscription citing the reason as “other players are immature assholes’”. Smooth.

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One day I'm going to get a real We Fly Spitfires badge and use it to impress people I meet in the street.

Continuing with my quest to deliver the most sexy and stylish blog possible (yes, even inanimate electronic objects can be sexy), I’ve put some more minor updates to the site live today. Probably the biggest change (for me anyway) is the use of Typekit to render the main title font and sidebar headers. Utilising fonts on the web is a real pain currently due to distribution issues and what not and previously I was using some code to generate my title fonts as images using PHP. Not only was that becoming a burden on my server due to increased traffic (and spam… lots and lots of spam) but it also makes the site slower to download for the user. Now everything should be a bit quicker and slicker.

Other changes include a more attractive nav and new social media links beneath the header. Not a massive change but a welcome one nonetheless. Oh and all of the adverts are now gone too.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts, likes or dislikes or if you encounter any bugs (I’d be really grateful if anyone got the chance to check the site on an iPad – not sure how the fonts will render on it).

Anyway, that’s enough of my rambling. We all know why you’re here! Let the link loveth commencify:

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We've only got one Earth so make the most of it - stay in and play video games.

One of the things that always attracts me to the MMORPG genre is the concept of the virtual world. To log on and exist as a digital representation of oneself in a completely fictitious yet vibrant and functioning world is probably as close a thing as we’re going to come to virtual reality any time soon. The first time you wander around a city and encounter a group of players dancing for absolutely no reason, bump into someone wearing awesome gear you’ve never seen before or accidentally overhear a couple cybering in a quiet alleyway make you really appreciate the hidden gems of the eccentric world you now inhabit. These small encounters create a sense of randomness, a sense of freedom and, probably most importantly, a sense of virtual community.

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Much like Keen, I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Guild Wars. I bought it when it first came and enjoyed it well enough but it failed to lure me away from Everquest 2 at the time. Although I’ve heard plenty of good things about it, I’ve never played GW again since 2005 as I was put off by its heavily instanced, hub-centered gameplay. It felt far too much like a glorified arcade game and chat room system than an actual persistent, vibrant and flourishing virtual world (this is much my same gripe with Warhammer Online). Even though it’s very admirable and revolutionary in being totally subscription free, that in itself didn’t sway me either – which I suppose just goes to show that price isn’t everything (but that’s a different blog post).

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SOE's successful "You're in our world now" slogan stirred a lot of emotions in teenage boys.

So a few days ago SOE announced their next MMO in the Everquest series called, cleverly enough, Everquest Next (for some reason Everquest 3 just didn’t have a nice enough ring to it). I was very surprised when I heard the news as well as a little bewildered. At first I thought it was just another low-key video game like their Playstation 2 or PDA versions but nope, it’s apparently a real, full-blown, fully fledged MMORPG. Neat.

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Choke point not blocked. Amateur. /rolleyes

Zergling rush. Protoss Photon Cannon cheese. Build orders. Choke points. Kekekeke. I’m slowly losing my sanity to Starcraft 2 multiplayer. Funny thing is, I can’t decide if I totally love the game or utterly detest it. I’m really not very good at it but my mildly competitive nature and stubborn streak is preventing me from giving up. I must conquer Battle.net and it plagues my dreams. SCV 8, build barracks. 11, upgrade Command Center. 18, launch attack… I think my head’s going to explode.

I haven’t had much time to play MMOs the past seven days but that doesn’t mean the blogs have stopped churning out excellent and captivating articles. SCV 9, proceed with link love.

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