I was reading a post over at We Fly Spitfires and felt the urge to comment. This isn’t something I do often on foreign soil, but it’s been known to happen. It’s not for any particular reason, mind you, I just rarely see the effort involved in making the lurker->community member transition to be a useful one. But that whole dynamic is another post entirely. I actually like reading Gordon’s stuff as we have similar sensibilities when it comes to MMOs. We Fly Spitfires is one of the few gaming blogs that I deign to add into my “Gaming” folder in ye olde Firefox toolbar.

At any rate, my flow of thoughts on his Old Republic review turned into a fairly lengthy rebuttal, so instead of dropping a deuce on someone’s front lawn I thought it would be more appropriate to post here and let the magic of trackbacks do their thing. Direct quotes are quoted, although things are fairly out of order. You can read his full review here. My rebuttal starts with a cold open regarding launch in general. Check it out after the fold…

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The Old Republic launches in just a few hours. What little time I’ve had free this holiday season has been spent furiously sabering in the headstart to get a jump on things. The guild is humming along nicely, so if’n you’re so inclined drop by and have a look.

The web-based guild program seems to be a great success for easing people into the process. We didn’t have to scramble for the 5k credits or run people all over creation quick-like to get our guild name on some arbitrary server. Everyone who was in the web guild was immediately prompted to join with their new character and the server selection screen handily notes our deployment server. For those keeping score, we landed on Shii-Cho.

The game itself is not without it’s bugs, but in my estimation it’s launching at the same level of polish and quality as WoW did way back. I accept that as a fairly beginning. Time will tell if they can really make this thing work, but I have to believe the BioWare is all-in on this title.

How easy it is to lose track of time. One finds oneself “getting by” doing only the things that are right in front of them. That’s been my year in a nutshell.

In the current economic climate I’m tremendously thankful that I’ve got a great job doing work I really care about, but the simple reality is the time available for indulgences like this site is pretty limited. I had planned to move the site off DreamHost and onto another provider, but after investigating a few popular ones I just couldn’t see a driving reason. It doesn’t seem like anyone out there can escape criticisms that make my frustrations with DH seem meaningless – or at least meaningless when combined with the effort required to move a site wholesale.

Anywho…

The big news coming down the road is the launch of Old Republic in mid-December. I’m cautiously optimistic. At this point I’m honestly more worried about pulling enough people away from WoW to be fun and have access to 100% of the content. Rift couldn’t hold people, it was fairly foolish to think otherwise. Live and learn, I guess.

It’s probably worth mentioning that yes, I am a TINY bit interested in playing a Monk in WoW. I loved my Monk in EQ and I have yet to play a good game that “got monks right”. I don’t think WoW will either, at least not the way I want, but I bet it’ll get close. They’re promising a TON of character animation (and a host of new ones for existing classes/races) so they may have something.

It’s still WoW, though. That doesn’t change. In … 90 (Jesus!) levels it’ll be back to the same stuff that I don’t really enjoy anymore just like now. The Diablo 3 for free thing on a year pass subscription is certainly interesting though. You’re effectively getting a really expensive copy of Diablo and a year to play (or not play) WoW. Or reverse that, I guess. Meh? I didn’t really plan on buying D3 to begin with…

Interesting times, at any rate.

Still alive and wicked busy. My company is slightly understaffed as business is, as they say, “booming”. When I’m not working on work I’m working on play, with the Benevolence Suicide Kings app taking the bulk of my non-work-non-gaming time these days. It’s hectic and oftentimes frustrating, but it’s the good kind. The kind you want to experience.

A few items to note just in case I don’t make it back around here anytime soon -

Tron Legacy was an average movie. The soundtrack by Daft Punk is excellent. You’ll see it pop up on my last.fm scrobble feed often. Note: I liked the movie, I’m just under no illusions that it was, at best, average.

The Golden Globe noms alternate between terrible and FUCK! THAT IS TERRIBLE!

I’m moving my parents from an old XP box to a new Mac Mini this spring. I need a shower.

The Steam holiday sale has ruined me. I’ve added frightening number of titles since mid-December. There are a few I’m really looking forward to playing, but the ones that are taking up the bulk of my time right now are DeathSpank and Recettear. DeathSpank is a Torchlight/Diablo/whatever style title intended to be a parody and Recettear is a JRPG. YMMV.

I’ve been playing Spreadsheeeeeeets iiiiiiin Spaaaaaaace Eve again. But that won’t last long, I’d wager.

Cataclysm is out. I’m not playing. WoW is done for me. I went back, briefly, but by the end of the 2nd month it just felt like I was playing because I was supposed to play. There was no joy in Mudville. Here’s hoping 2011 snags me an Old Republic invite post-haste.

I guess that’s all the update I can muster for now. Toodles.