Fortune Favors: The Comic

Yes, I know they won’t sell 99% of the time.

Yeah, yeah, I got off my butt and made another comic.  Granted, I made sure to finish a decent amount of paperwork required by my employer before I did so.  This one’s based not particularly on the frustration of getting Murloc eyes for that Westfall Stew quest, but more so on the sheer abundance of eyes I usually get when later adventuring in Redridge.  Great, now that I don’t need them, I’m swimming in eyes?

Um … that was a disturbing image.

The character you see before you us Dugal, my new shadow priest.  Yes, I rolled another alt. and leveled him to 21.  He’s also probably going to stay 21 for some time, as leveling in Northrend is sooooo much better than Outland.  I’ll probably start playing him again when my main eventually hits 80.

No, I’m not 80 yet.  Some of us have lives, wives and/or careers.

And some of us make simple little screenshot comics and put them on the internet.

There are many reasons I haven’t been updating regularly, which for convenience I’ve divided into two categories: honest and whiny.

Whiny:

• School’s in full swing.  Some of us have to work for a living.
• I’ve been sick.
• The free time I’ve had in front of my computer has been spent actually playing the game, instead of making comics about it.  Gotta get that cool new ride, after all…

Honest:

• The Mac version of WoWmodelviewer, which I’ve been using to help make comics since the first one, was seriously broken by patch 3.0.2.  Suggestions that I get Windows so I can use that version will be met with cold stares.  I can and heve made comics without it, but they take longer to set up.

[EDIT]

I’ve not been totally idle, though.  I’ve started blogging again on the Fortune Favors Guild Site.

[/EDIT]

As most WoW players probably already know, the next patch will be lowering the level at which you can buy mounts from 40 to 30, as well as reducing the cost to 35 gold.  This is just the most recent in a long string of changes meant to help players level faster, in anticipation of the ten additional levels they’ll be adding with the next expansion pack.

Many of us that have been playing for more than a year (and therefore feel like we can call ourselves “old timers”) meet these changes with mixed feelings.  Sure, they help us level our low level alts faster, but there is a narrow range between “too hard to be fun” and “too easy to be fun.”  Easy mode is not always a good thing.

That, and the new players might not appreciate their mounts, epics, and more if they don’t have to work as hard to get them.

If i didn’t feel old before, I sure do, now.

I started playing MMORPGs in college, back when most of them were free and you had to either dial into their servers directly or navigate that wonderful system known as “telnet.”  Many of us who had found these games through one friend or another had cut our teeth playing paper-and-pencil RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, and any one of a dozen more.  I could wax nostalgic for hours on the topic, but my key point is that in those games you would get further and have more fun by actually playing the part of your character.

The idea of spontaneous acting in response to both random and controlled events was very appealing to me, and still is.  It’s unfortunate that many of the players out there have discarded the “RP” in “MMORPG” in favor of a more Halo “let’s shoot things until they stop moving and then do unspeakable things to their corpses” style of play.

I’m not saying that virtual (key word, there) wanton mayhem is unenjoyable. I simply propose that a style of gaming that requires the additional skill set of impromptu acting can also be fun to do.  Unfortunately, such skills must often be honed over time.  Many people, new to the genre, tend to make the same mistakes.  I myself have made countless errors, which my ego prevents me from rendering in comic form.

However, there are a few things that I just couldn’t resist memorializing due to the fact that they’ve been so overdone.  I’ve seen each of these examples repeatedly just in this past week, and that’s on a server that (I’ve been told) has a much better ratio of true role players than several of the other servers designated by Blizzard to be “RP.”  I imagine that some of the guilty parties portrayed here will eventually grow out of the phases they’re in that encourage these types of behavior.  At least, I hope so.

Your opinion might be different from my own as to whether these are worth having on an RP server, but I avoid them (or parody them) with a passion.

Let the comics commence!