Three Years, Plus One

To My Lovely Bride, as we begin a new year,

Four years ago, we met for the first time, and my life has been richer, fuller, ever since. Three years ago, we said, "I do," surrounded by family and with our friends on Twitter cheering us on. Today, our Spousal Leveling Contract finishes level 3, and we start level 4. We are so alike and yet so different. Your strengths make up for my weaknesses, but I can only hope to shore up any of yours. I am sure I can be exasperating at times.

I saw this the other day and saved it for this occasion. I hope I can be this romantic when I'm old and grey. I love you.

In some ways, it feels like I've known you forever. Like you're the other half of me that I was missing all those years before we met. In other ways, our time together seems to have flown by. Like we just met. So many changes in such a short time. It has been an adventure this far, and I hope to keep our quest log full for decades to come.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

MegaStar

Hello, Dear Reader. It seems so long since we have been here. Blaugust came to an end and so did my posting. I only planned to take a one- or two-day break that coincided with Labor Day and a business flight on Tuesday. Instead, that break stretched out to the weekend, and now it's been a full week since I posted.

Luckily, I managed to avoid the bulk of what has come to be known as GamerGate, an appellation that surely shows how serious it is. Which is not very. Someday, maybe people will realize they should not feed the trolls. And yes, while I do not believe that both sides of the debate have equal merit, I do believe both sides have exhibited trollish behavior, from what I have seen.

Meanwhile, Carbine has created a minor -gate of their own with the announcement of a server restructuring that will leave us with only four WildStar megaservers, none of which are designated RP servers. This caused immediate consternation within the RP community, who had seen WildStar as a haven for RP activity. While I have all my characters on Evindra, a North American RP server, I almost always play alone or in partnership with my beloved bride, Scooter. I usually view RP servers as friendlier and more mature, but many folks are taking to the forum feedback thread to complain bitterly and even announce their /ragequit.

The RPers don't want to be thrown in with the general population, full of players the RPers are clearly superior to. Seriously, they whine about griefers before the problem has materialized. They may have a point, I don't know. But I don't think they really do either. What they were bringing up as examples of griefing behavior seems to be mostly oblivious people going about their business, rather than a malicious attempt to ruin anybody's fun. And of course, the devs are complete hacks (according to some RPers) who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, much less implement the "simple" fixes these armchair programmers come up with. But at this point, we just have to wait see how things shake out. I do hope that the opportunities for RP that these players crave do materialize, though it may take more effort on their part than simply picking a server.

In preparation for the megamerger, Carbine is offering free transfers to other realms. Though I didn't really see the point, this guy totally did. Then again, he transferred all of his characters at once rather than stagger them, which meant two days of down time. In the future, I hope he learns his lesson and keeps at least one character playable until the others are fully transferred.

One last thing the forum RPers were up in arms about is the implementation of second names coming with the megaservers. Apparently, people are so hidebound that they can't even imagine having a surname for their character, and are even willing to quit over it. I, on the other hand, love the idea, having had formal full names for my characters ever since STO (still one of the most RP friendly games I have seen, though some may disagree). Up till now in WildStar, I've basically mashed my character surnames into their given names (e.g, RowanBlaze, LyraSedgeweaver, etc.). Despite some initial confusion on the forums, the plan is that, after the megaserver implementation, everyone will have the opportunity (be forced) to change their name to include two words with a space between them.

As well as the allowance of at least one space in character names, I think the megaserver is something Carbine should have implemented from the beginning. And I am not alone in that opinion. If you're affected by all this and have not done so already, check out Kaelish's digest here. Along with the FAQ, you'll probably get all the info you need there, without developing an aneurysm.

Meanwhile, I started yet another character: Leonotis (Leonurus), pictured above. He's a Cassian Esper, and my first Explorer, as well. He's definitely a character, but I'll have more details in another post.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.