MMO Gnome. Act One. A pathetic beginning.

[Excellent comic thingy to the left ripped off from the rather hilarious excellent-comic-thingy producing GUComics.com]

I've always loved Mr. Hill's quite excellent and rather funny Neverquest features. I enjoyed his amazing Second Life pimping R2-D2 story and his magical lute and a threesome adventure that much, that I actually decided to give MMO gaming a try. Always being a cheap(-ish) gnome and easily scared of the infamous World of Warcraft forums I decided to start off easily.

Start off with a free version of Anarchy Online.

Apparently a bad idea. The interface was a complicated mess, the pdf manual rather confusing, the graphics shite, and the rather interesting game world was populated by people ready to point out the obvious truth I was a newbie. My desire to be sarcastic simply went unnoticed and after 5 long and painful hours and 2 pretty unsuccessful sessions I wisely decided to quit. How newbie-ish of me, really.

Then, Star Wars Galaxies came along offering a nice 14-day free trial without asking for my fiercely guarded credit card details. I decided to really try and show some understanding this time. Try to be a serious and devoted player. Thus, I showed ueber-human patience while the game went on and downloaded itself and its humongous patches for ages (that's an almost 2 Giga monster), and was gracious in granting it the 4+ Gigas it demanded from my already crammed hard-drive. I even spent one whole hour creating my old, short, wrinkled, skinny, rogue-ish, ugly and very very agile online persona: Gnomie Freeware. Then I got through a tutorial stage that while teaching me that the WASD keys are used for moving and that "J" surprisingly brings up the Journal screen, decided to ignore pretty crucial stuff like using special abilities or the subtleties of leveling up.

Standard Star Wars action I suppose.

Still, I persevered. I reached level 6 after completing ten different missions that required I destroyed (in a horrible FPSy manner) some malfunctioning droids in order to obtain such diverse items as star-ship upgrades, extra droid components and CPU parts. Then I duly killed some rats (yes, space-rats), tried a few fetch-quests and finally left the rather bland newbie training place for the lush desert surroundings of Mos Eisley.

Tehehe... (via)

Not feeling the excitement of actually being in such a famed place just yet, both I and my avatar tried amusing ourselves by struggling to not get lost and exploring this familiar looking place. We tried to act all friendly and charismatic. Went as far as helping a guy posing as a Sexy Jedi Lady (the heresy was almost unbearable) survive a Storm Troopers assault and after being properly thanked, we humbly asked for a few tips and got a nice stfu for an answer. Pity. Seemed like a fine staff-wielding lass. And I was bored already...

Presumably, so are you dear reader. So, to cut a long story short, the experience of actually being Gnomie Freeware in the Star Wars universe never really took off. Didn't even exhaust my 14-day trial. Oh, sod it, guess I never wanted to be a Han Solo look-alike in a rude galaxy far far away. All I ever wanted was a Second Life... Or a bit of Warhammer action...

Un-related @ Gnome's Lair: Darth on Darth, Star Wars in ascii, Ninja Loves Pirate: the Interview, Wik



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