A Return to PvP

So last night I did PvP with my Guild Wars guild for the first time in months.

We chose alliance battles because it's easier to put together four person groups, and AB is way more rewarding than Team Arenas or Random Arenas. (Plus, I hate them.) They're also much more newbie-friendly, and we're trying to recruit some new blood from our alliance.

Another bonus? Kurzick and Luxon faction are actually worth something! When you redeem it, it counts towards your Alliegance Rank title track (Kurzick or Luxon, depending upon your allegiance). You can cash it in for valuable crafting materials (amber chunks for Kurzick and jadeite shards for Luxon). If you're title-crazy, you can donate it to your guild and get double credit towards your title! Plus, it can be used to get PvE skills, which also counts double.

I had so much fun! Why have I been away? I love my guildees!

Confessions of a Guild Wars addict!

Wow. Can't believe I've never talked about Guild Wars. I mean, I'm an addict. Really.

I've been playing Guild Wars since less than two months after its release on April 28, 2005. For the first seven months, my husband and I played on our own or with a small group of RL friends. Then, in January 2006, I found Christian Gamers Alliance, which has a very active GW chapter! Woohoo! We joined and found out that GW is even more fun with an active guild...cause my husband talked me into liking PvP!

Okay, "talked into" is a bit of a stretch. What really happened is that he told me, "Here, they need a mesmer. Do what Fiona Dredd tells you." He then logged me in to TeamSpeak and left me there!

After I got over the shock, I started having fun. Sure, I had NO IDEA what I was doing, but it was still fun. And now we do PvP every Tuesday and Friday night. (Oh yeah, Friday night playing a video game. I really am a geek.) In fact, I'm now rank 3 (/rank)...and I only earned about twenty or thirty of that rank during double fame. GO SoE!

Oh yeah, "SoE" would be "Spirit of Elijah," my guild. Well, technically I'm in two guilds; my husband and I have two accounts, and we each have characters on each account. One account is in each guild. So to be exact, I'm an officer in both SoE AND SOE...Spirit of Elisha, that is. Twice the fun! Except that we're actually one guild. (Yeah, it confuses us, too.)

And now my social life depends heavily on TeamSpeak, alliance chat, guild chat, and team chat. Is that good or bad?

Online RPGs as an economy?

I was never really interested in MMORPGs until a friend let me try Guild Wars. It's so much fun! (Check out the screenshots of "Maid Mirawyn". Mirawyn loves yaks, and especially enjoys visiting Yak's Bend.) My husband also got me to try Diablo II (which neither of us ever thought would happen), and it's fun, too. But I still can't understand the EverCrack and WarCrack addictions! (That's "EverQuest" and "World of Warcraft" to the normals. If you ever have an addicted friend, you'll understand the nicknames.)

EverQuest players, in particular, are infamous for the incredible amounts of money they will pay for in-game stuff. High level characters or rare items can go for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. That's real money, mind you, not in-game money! And players have to pay a monthly fee (neither of my games has a fee), as well as buying the game and expansions. (The games require a pretty fast computer with lots of memory, and high speed access, too. I have the computer and broadband anyway, but you get the idea...)

Anyway, one economist-gamer by the name of Edward Castronova wrote a scholarly paper on virtual economies, primarily EverQuest and Ultima Online. He calculated how much a platinum piece is worth in real-world dollars, as well as how much wealth is created every day. By his reckoning, the world of EverQuest is the seventy-seventh richest country in the world, based on the real-world value of its "virtual property." Wow!

If you're looking for a career and are good with video games, there are people who make a living aquiring and selling that virtual property! How do you list that job on a resume?