So, while I am a night time gamer, a night owl, lazy ass who sleeps during the day till late afternoon, I play at night. While I am generally awake during the prime time of pvping and such for my guild, after midnight or one a.m.-ish most of the guild logs for the night. And while I can easily go pvp solo or in a small group of whoever is left awake, it's usually slow in the wee hours of the night.

And yea there are other things I can do ingame. Since I only came back a few weeks ago, I still need to build up a stockpile of gold and gear. My main is finished and geared but my alts, which I'll end up playing about half the time, still need finishing. Or I could farm, which both myself and my nation needs. More gold for the nation, more sieges/banes we can do, equals more large scale pvp.

BUT, sometimes it gets, not boring, but dull. Like I'll spend from 8 p.m. EST pvping with the nation, until hour X. Now hour X, can be a long time, as we do small scale group vs group for world map resources, and later a siege/bane can start. Those, can last many hours. So I could be pvping basically non-stop from 8 p.m. till who knows. The longest was a bane/siege that didn't end until like 3 or 4 a.m. EST (it began at 11 p.m.) and prior to that we had smaller scale pvp.

So yea when it gets dull as I call it, is when it's like 3 a.m., there's maybe 3 people in Teamspeak (myself being one of them) and the other 2 are afk. While solo pvp is fun, it gets slow and not quite as fun as being with others (in my opinion). And farming, while needed, gets tedious after a while and you just want a break.

I started considering a secondary game. I occasionally pop into CS 1.6 or Natural Selection for an hour here and there to change the pace. But I prefer MMO's to FPS. So I was looking for a secondary MMO that I could casually pickup. I kinda settled on Archlord, it's as close to Shadowbane in terms of affecting the world map and guilds, other than UO atm. It would only be something I'd play late late night when no one else...

I've noticed a trend. The last few guilds I've been in, of course are almost entire made of males like myself. Yet, almost no one in these guilds is a real geek. None care for comic books, or Star Trek or anything science fiction/fantasy aside from maybe catching one of the latest super hero movies from this past summer.

Normally that's not a bad thing. Not everyone enjoys the geek genre of movies/tv shows/comics/games right? Well the trend I'm talking about is what I like to dub the polar opposite. In high school, what's the polar opposite of us geeks? Usually the popular football players. I'm noticing the same thing here, kind of. The guys in previous guilds (and to a certain degree my current one) love nothing more than talking about football, cars, etc I like cars, but I know jackshit about cars. I however do not like football, I actually dislike it a lot. I hate how every autumn and winter, America turns into one giant football watching nation where you are looked upon as if you have the plaque, if you don't like football. Whatever happened to baseball being America's favorite past time? I'm no baseball fanatic, sadly because my state has no pro team. But sports in general I'm not a fan of.

Mainly cause the games are all the same, with different rules. Get a ball down a line a certain distance, place a ball in a hoop, hit a ball with a stick, etc Not to mention teams are constantly changing rosters. Yea people get old, players get hurt, etc But I can never justify getting behind a team who one year may have Roster X then in just a year or two a good number of Roster X may no longer be on that team (potentially). So the players you were a fan of no longer play or no longer play for that team. Wasted effort in following them imho.

So when your guildies are sitting around and doing nothing but talking about football, stats, and stuff, I really feel out of place. I kinda just listen, and space out. While I'm sure others would feel the same way if I or others did nothing but talk about say, comic...

Hit 75 the other day, got geared up totally (none of that WoW-type constant grind to get gear) and it's all pvp sailing from here. Nothing like playing a Priest imho. It's a hell of a lot more difficult to keep your party healed and not-debuffed than it is to just run around swinging a weapon or casting a nuke, imho.

Now I can just concentrate on pvp and build other alt toons in my spare time.

While some changes to my favorite SB class, the Priest, were made before I took a year's forced sabbatical. Others, not so much. I love how one spell (Shadowmantle) can negate an entire class. So while I can respec easily and get a debuff remover to deal with it, it's kinda broken imho. I mean one spell negates literally everything my Priest can do. I know, it's all in favor of balance. Something needs to beat something. Rock needs to beat Scissors. But damn, it could be at least a combo of spells to thwart my ability to not let my comrades die in ever glorious battle.

Getting used to some patches since then has been interesting. I enjoy some changes, applaud a few, and holy god hate some of them at the same time. The Priest coulda gotten a little lovin in the last few patches, but no-go.

Aside from that, my main is complete in terms of levels and almost done with skills once I do a quick respec. Getting gear is easy enough, little farming and I'll have the money to do as I wish. A week or two of farming and I can begin rebuilding my empire once again > The only downside of them wiping the servers and starting fresh, we all start from ground zero. Soon....soon...

One of the great things I liked about SB was the uber fast leveling. You could easily get from lvl 1 to the cap in a day, with some good people leveling you. At most, two days. I dunno maybe it's just me but it's alot harder to level a support toon that can't kill on it's own now than it was in the past. In the past I could easily jump into usually one of several groups out leveling. Now? It's...slower.

Don't get me wrong, I still gain from pvp and pve but the pve part is supposed to be a minimal amount, to cap and that's it. I'm relying on nothing but pvp at this point, which kinda sucks cause that's slower. If I could hit cap, then I'd only need worry about pvp and not about pve anymore.

Hopefully things will pick up soon.

So after a year or so sabbatical from gaming (damn PC exploding) I finally returned to my rightful home of Shadowbane (best pvp mmo there is). Saedron seems to be picking up in population, since they wiped the servers and replaced them with new ones. Doesn't seem to be any one super zerg but several large nations and plenty of mid-size to small-size ones. Got my Priest rolling, shouldn't take but a day or two to hit the cap and start getting gear. The guild has been awesomely kind in giving me stuff since I'm starting out on the new server absolutely broke, which sucks cause on Vindication I was one rich bastard and could roll and afford any item I wanted.

I've never done a blog thing before, at least not in this setting. Almost 100% unlikely anyone will read it but hey, if one or two people stumble on it, they might. So I'll be posting my gaming related bullshit here on a regular basis.