Wired has a great little post about how Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW.

There are a lot of folks who swear by Ventrilo, and of course raiding guilds won’t let you in without it. I’ve steadfastly refused to use it, for exactly one of the reasons put forth by the guy writing the article–I’m a woman. When I’m typing in text I find it fairly easy to use language that’s ambiguous in terms of its sexuality; people almost always assume I’m a guy. I like that because I don’t get hit on and I don’t get folks condescending to me just because I’m female. I’m also naturally introverted, and as he pointed out, shy folks tend not to say much on voice chat–which leaves everyone listening to the locker room banter of the raucous teens in most guilds. That’s just never appealed to me; I can’t imagine why.

One of the downsides to the included voice chat in LotRO, I’ve found, is that folks are less tolerant of your not using it even in the simplest of quest fellowships. I’ll have folks making pointed comments about how I really should use it not because we actually need it for anything we’re doing, but because someone in the fellowship doesn’t feel like typing. I’ve taken to telling them my mic is broken. I definitely enjoy the game more when I can’t tell that the bearded dwarf is a 10-year-old, and he can’t tell that my hobbit guardian is a woman old enough to be his mother. Unless I’m getting to be friends with someone on-line I honestly don’t want them to know my gender and age, and if I had a 10-year-old kid playing one of these games I wouldn’t want him chatting away with midde-aged strangers.

I’m glad voice chat is available; I always loved listening in on the snarky jokes when my husband went raiding (he’d leave the output set to speaker so I could listen in). I just think it would be nice if folks would respect the wishes of those who don’t want to broadcast their voice–and their identity–to everyone else. Obviously that isn’t always an option when raiding, but in lesser circumstances it shouldn’t be an issue.

Speaking of raiding, as Foton notes over at AFK Gamer Blizz has started nerfing some of the attunements. It seems they’ve finally realized they’re alienating all but the most hardcore of raiding guilds with much of their complex end-game content and making it hard for even those guilds to bring newer members up to speed. Unfortunately I’ve found I’ve already gotten kind of fed up with the end-game content over there. I want to continue playing, but every time I think about logging in I consider what I could do when I log in and how many times I’ve done it before… and I log in to LotRO instead. Of course, as Van Hemlock notes, there are bunches of other games out there to try too, and his reminder got me to download D&D online last night just for kicks. So far it’s fun but I doubt I’ll want to pay the subscription fee for it. It has the feel of a standard single-player boxed game in which you just happen to run into other people, whereas WoW and LotRO feel as though they’ve taken advantage of the massively multiplayer environment to become another beast entirely. Still, that’s a rather unfair judgment for me to make at such an early stage, so I’ll keep playing it for the rest of the trial period.

Today’s review: Just as a note, today’s book review is The King Arthur Flour Company Whole Grain Baking Book.

“Welcome to my IGNORE list”

I feel so productive this week. I’ve posted the review of Michalko’s Thinkpak. Upcoming: reviews of the King Arthur Flour Multigrain Baking Cookbook and Tony Ballantyne’s “Recursion.” I’m also halfway through an ARC of “Grammar & Style at Your Fingertips,” from Alpha Books’ upcoming new series.

In unrelated news, if you’re a LotRO fan, check out Foton’s new character (mildly maybe-NSFW). He seems to have decided to explore Hobbits & hunters in a rather unusual way. I never thought of Hobbits that way before, but hey. Keep an open mind, right? …Right?

Erm, uh, I’ll be going now…

I started reading the patch notes for LotRO’s Shores of Evendim update and my head is swimming. I think I’ve been reading for about 20 minutes or so, only to get to the bottom of the page and discover that there are two more whole sections to the patch notes. A ton of these changes are great things that folks have been asking for–updates or bug fixes–and I can’t wait to see how they work out in practice.

Well there’s one thing I’m seriously impressed with: the quantity of changes and fixes, and the brief period of time we had to wait for them, is a vast improvement over what I’m used to seeing with Warcraft. This pace of change makes Warcraft’s look positively glacial. I hope they keep it up–particularly the trend of adding in whole new content areas complete with full quest complements. I’m off to read the other two-thirds of the patch notes now…

Edited to add: I absolutely love LotRO’s patch notes. They’re the most entertaining patch notes I’ve ever had to read:

Assikko, the Earth-kin tribal leader was being very crafty and selfish when he thanked you for recovering the book he requests in the Techniques of the Masters quest. He refused to return the book but ushered you on to Gondranc anyways. He has been reprimanded and will return the book as needed to advance the quest.

Oh, and of course I can’t leave out:

After an unprecedented 3 months in a prolonged abdominal crunch posture, Nathan Hodges of Amon Raith has finally assumed an upright, locked position. As a result of his amazing accomplishment he has been awarded a North Downs Abs of Steel commemorative plaque.

It seems that the further Patience got in posting the update, the punchier she got. I approve.

Edit #2: Patience is already collecting known issues with the new patch. Whooo! Thanks to Foton for the link, although I disagree with his contention that the patch notes contain no character development!

We finally completed the escort quest, after several additional complications, such as the extermination company having input the wrong zip code and ended up in Baltimore instead of Annapolis. They sprayed for the ants (I swear it looks like our entire lawn is composed of ant colonies) and dusted our four carpenter bee nests. Things seem to be much better now.

Now our road is getting ripped up again. Mind you, I’m not really complaining, since the patch job they did last week mostly turned the street from a full-bore roller coaster ride to a kiddie roller coaster ride, which was only a minor improvement. This time it looks like they’re doing the whole thing. (You think I’m kidding with that roller coaster comment? There’s a spot across the street where we’d slow down to about five miles an hour and the car would still rock back and forth like it was on hydraulics.)

In entirely different news, Shores of Evendim is coming out for LotRO today! Whooo! They’re being smart by putting out regular free content updates. They’re also being smart by making the preview server available during the downtime with a special event to keep folks entertained. I’m looking forward to playing around after the servers come back up tonight.

So, we haven’t put in redirects from the old site yet (we’ll do that after we’ve brought over the last pieces, i.e. the reviews and the link directory), but since this blog is up and running I figured I might as well start posting here. I’ve found some interesting new sites of late, which you’ll find in the blogroll–such as Van Hemlock’s erudite gaming blog, Glod’n'Epix’s academic approach to gaming, and of course some additional comics like xkcd, Three Panel Soul, and Cyanide and Happiness. I have various things I want to post about in coming weeks, and a review that’s finished and waiting for the reviews blog to move over (with another one coming up soon), so come back soon! In the meantime, if you see any rough edges do let me know–we haven’t quite finished up yet and might have missed something.

Apparently my sub-quest to locate an exterminator has presented a new challenge in which the true quest has shown itself to be getting the exterminator to the house. My least favorite type of quest, presumably: an escort quest.

You see, a road crew ripped up our street this morning.
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I stumbled groggily out of bed, threw on some sort of clothing, and wended my way to the kitchen to get breakfast started while my husband took his shower. The cats curled around my ankles meowing for breakfast, and as I bent over to pet them I saw it:

The ants had taken over.
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We didn’t set out to make infant wear when we started making gamer wear. We just naturally included the designs on most of the available items at cafepress–including infant wear–because you never know what folks will want to buy. And lately it seems they’re buying gamer-wear for their kids.

Technorati Tags: cafe press, cafepress.com, humor, infant wear, mmorpg, baby wear, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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I haven’t hit the limits of the open beta for the Lord of the Rings Online game, but I have had a chance to play around a bit more, so it’s time for a few more thoughts on the game. Again, there will be a handful of comparisons with Warcraft just because that’s my other game of choice so it’s what I have to compare it to.

Technorati Tags: Lord of the Rings, LotRO, mmorpg, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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I now have an intel mac with boot camp and split os X/Windows, so I can play the Lord of the Rings Online Open Beta. I played a bit this weekend and have my first thoughts on the game.

Technorati Tags: LotRO, mmorpg, Lord of the Rings, video games, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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I think it’s worth watching this 9-minute YouTube video of a Korean World of Warcraft wedding just once, even though the constant camera motion will make you dizzy and the echoing quality of any vocals is just plain eerie, for the pure WTF?!-value.

Technorati Tags: mmorpg, LotRO, videos, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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