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Guild Wars 2	[Sep. 4th, 2012\|07:21 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
I've been playing GW2 for a week now (didn't pre-purchase, so no headstart or beta). Very brief review: I like it.Slightly less brief: best graphics of any MMO to date. This game is very pretty. I'm only up to level 13 (of 80) on my highest character, but the world feels very big. There are 5 races and 5 distinct starting zones. Also, in creating your character, you make several story choices, and your personal story quest will be based on all of those, so even within the starting zone, the content varies. They took Rift's dynamic event concept and improved it. Events happen more often, but are smaller scope, with the result that several times an hour you will have the opportunity to join in on some large group action if you choose. Unlike Rift, this doesn't mess with your current party structure.There are some big changes from the usual sorts of game systems. Your abilities depend on your class and weapons of choice. The action bar is 10 slots, and 5 are determined by your choice of weapon(s), and so can be changed on the fly. The other half are your choices based on abilities from your class. This is both more limited and more flexible than the usual model. Each class (there are 10) has a skill mechanic that is completely unique to their class.What's harder to describe is all the little things they get right. So many annoyances have been removed. For instance, crafting is done at crafting stations, which are available in quite a few places. You have full bank access at a crafting station so you can shuffle ingredients, intermediate results, and finished products back and forth with your bank with out running back and forth. Also, crafting materials that you gather can be transferred directly to your bank from anywhere, and the bank has special storage for those materials that don't take up regular bank inventory slots. Also, your bank storage is shared among all your characters. (Which means you don't have as much storage if you have a lot of characters, but if you have characters gathering crafting materials, you don't have to do a lot of inventory management to get them to your crafters. Resource nodes and non-competitive. Each person can mine a copper node once per spawn, rather than only the first one that gets there. You can put money in the bank, wihch can then be accessed by all your characters. There are no mailboxes, you can send or receive mail from anywhere.There are waypoints all over the map and you can port between them at will for a small fee once you've been there once to activate it. No running long periods of time just to get back to where you were questing before, or to go to town and buy something and then come right back. There are portals between all the major cities that do NOT need to be unlocked. If you join a guild, or a party, your account joins. All your characters are in that guild, or party. If you switch characters, your new character is in the same group, and same guild. There are pros and cons to this, but mostly it's a convenience.There are no pvp servers. There are no player factions. pvp is either arbitrary teams, guild vs guild, or server vs server. So running around the world, there are no inherent conflicts among player factions.It's hard to explain how nice the lack of "standard annoyances" is. Many of those things you just have to put up with in all the other MMOs simply aren't there.So, if anyone winds up in GW2, I'm on the Sorrow's Furnace server. I've joined a small guild run by a co-worker's husband, which most of the people I know would find comfortable. If you're looking for me, search for "ChooseYourMasks.5784". That's my account display name, it'll find any of my characters that happen to be logged in. (It might even find me if I'm not online, not sure.) Convenient, no? Friends lists work that way too, you only have to friend the account, not every character on it.
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[Sep. 4th, 2012|07:21 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc

I've been playing GW2 for a week now (didn't pre-purchase, so no headstart or beta). Very brief review: I like it.Slightly less brief: best graphics of any MMO to date. This game is very pretty. I'm only up to level 13 (of 80) on my highest character, but the world feels very big. There are 5 races and 5 distinct starting zones. Also, in creating your character, you make several story choices, and your personal story quest will be based on all of those, so even within the starting zone, the content varies. They took Rift's dynamic event concept and improved it. Events happen more often, but are smaller scope, with the result that several times an hour you will have the opportunity to join in on some large group action if you choose. Unlike Rift, this doesn't mess with your current party structure.There are some big changes from the usual sorts of game systems. Your abilities depend on your class and weapons of choice. The action bar is 10 slots, and 5 are determined by your choice of weapon(s), and so can be changed on the fly. The other half are your choices based on abilities from your class. This is both more limited and more flexible than the usual model. Each class (there are 10) has a skill mechanic that is completely unique to their class.What's harder to describe is all the little things they get right. So many annoyances have been removed. For instance, crafting is done at crafting stations, which are available in quite a few places. You have full bank access at a crafting station so you can shuffle ingredients, intermediate results, and finished products back and forth with your bank with out running back and forth. Also, crafting materials that you gather can be transferred directly to your bank from anywhere, and the bank has special storage for those materials that don't take up regular bank inventory slots. Also, your bank storage is shared among all your characters. (Which means you don't have as much storage if you have a lot of characters, but if you have characters gathering crafting materials, you don't have to do a lot of inventory management to get them to your crafters. Resource nodes and non-competitive. Each person can mine a copper node once per spawn, rather than only the first one that gets there. You can put money in the bank, wihch can then be accessed by all your characters. There are no mailboxes, you can send or receive mail from anywhere.There are waypoints all over the map and you can port between them at will for a small fee once you've been there once to activate it. No running long periods of time just to get back to where you were questing before, or to go to town and buy something and then come right back. There are portals between all the major cities that do NOT need to be unlocked. If you join a guild, or a party, your account joins. All your characters are in that guild, or party. If you switch characters, your new character is in the same group, and same guild. There are pros and cons to this, but mostly it's a convenience.There are no pvp servers. There are no player factions. pvp is either arbitrary teams, guild vs guild, or server vs server. So running around the world, there are no inherent conflicts among player factions.It's hard to explain how nice the lack of "standard annoyances" is. Many of those things you just have to put up with in all the other MMOs simply aren't there.So, if anyone winds up in GW2, I'm on the Sorrow's Furnace server. I've joined a small guild run by a co-worker's husband, which most of the people I know would find comfortable. If you're looking for me, search for "ChooseYourMasks.5784". That's my account display name, it'll find any of my characters that happen to be logged in. (It might even find me if I'm not online, not sure.) Convenient, no? Friends lists work that way too, you only have to friend the account, not every character on it.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic	[Nov. 19th, 2011\|02:13 pm]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
At first I was excited about this game, and then everything I heard from the forums, blogs, etc. pretty much turned me off on it. I had no intention of playing it. But then I got a beta weekend invite (I'd signed up as wanting to be a tester a LONG time ago). I got to play the game last weekend. And now I (and Vinny) have it on pre-order and am very much looking forward to it. :) I'll try to post here when I know which servers (one per faction as usual) I end up on.There's another test weekend next weekend, 11/25-28 (yes, Thanksgiving weekend, so impossible for some people, and ideal for others). You can get into this one if you want. You have through tomorrow, I believe. Go to swtor.com and/or tor.zam.com to get a beta invite. They're letting in anyone who signs up, to have as heavy a load as they can get. (The NDA just lifted yesterday, so the web ecosystem for the game is really just coming online, but if you want to read blogs and stuff, google for torwars, forcejunkies, darthhater, and r2-db.)I could say a lot about the game, and why I'm interested in it, but I'll go with the bottom line: It feels like WoW, back when I enjoyed WoW.To be fair, I never got anywhere NEAR the end game in one weekend. I was playing content that was unique to each class, so I never did the same thing twice. There's no guarantee that this won't wear thin really quickly. (If I'd never played WoW and got in for a weekend right now, I'd probably love it.) It's very story focused, which is very cool, but stories are inherently linear. Possibly too linear for an altoholic like me. It all remains to be seen. I may get a few months out of it, or maybe a few years (though with all the competing titles coming up, that's unlikely). Rift didn't really hold my interest long enough, and the primary reason was the single path to max level.By the way, the WoW guilds have been handed off to textivore. Took me a long time to actually find someone on line at the times I can generally log in that I could hand them off to. So I've shut down the last of my 3 WoW accounts (of course, they're still there if I ever want them again). It goes dormant in about a week. Rift charged before I realized I was at the deadline, so divaprime and I have another 5 months on those accounts (which we haven't used in several months, that's what I get for slacking). Email through LJ gets to me, though I check my email pretty seldom because of the amount of spam. I'm going to go edit my profile and put some other contact info in there in case anyone wants to get hold of me. I miss you guys.
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Star Wars: The Old Republic

[Nov. 19th, 2011|02:13 pm]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc

At first I was excited about this game, and then everything I heard from the forums, blogs, etc. pretty much turned me off on it. I had no intention of playing it. But then I got a beta weekend invite (I'd signed up as wanting to be a tester a LONG time ago). I got to play the game last weekend. And now I (and Vinny) have it on pre-order and am very much looking forward to it. :) I'll try to post here when I know which servers (one per faction as usual) I end up on.There's another test weekend next weekend, 11/25-28 (yes, Thanksgiving weekend, so impossible for some people, and ideal for others). You can get into this one if you want. You have through tomorrow, I believe. Go to swtor.com and/or tor.zam.com to get a beta invite. They're letting in anyone who signs up, to have as heavy a load as they can get. (The NDA just lifted yesterday, so the web ecosystem for the game is really just coming online, but if you want to read blogs and stuff, google for torwars, forcejunkies, darthhater, and r2-db.)I could say a lot about the game, and why I'm interested in it, but I'll go with the bottom line: It feels like WoW, back when I enjoyed WoW.To be fair, I never got anywhere NEAR the end game in one weekend. I was playing content that was unique to each class, so I never did the same thing twice. There's no guarantee that this won't wear thin really quickly. (If I'd never played WoW and got in for a weekend right now, I'd probably love it.) It's very story focused, which is very cool, but stories are inherently linear. Possibly too linear for an altoholic like me. It all remains to be seen. I may get a few months out of it, or maybe a few years (though with all the competing titles coming up, that's unlikely). Rift didn't really hold my interest long enough, and the primary reason was the single path to max level.By the way, the WoW guilds have been handed off to

textivore. Took me a long time to actually find someone on line at the times I can generally log in that I could hand them off to. So I've shut down the last of my 3 WoW accounts (of course, they're still there if I ever want them again). It goes dormant in about a week. Rift charged before I realized I was at the deadline, so

divaprime and I have another 5 months on those accounts (which we haven't used in several months, that's what I get for slacking). Email through LJ gets to me, though I check my email pretty seldom because of the amount of spam. I'm going to go edit my profile and put some other contact info in there in case anyone wants to get hold of me. I miss you guys.

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5p pst/8p est Guild Meeting TODAY!	[May. 22nd, 2011\|12:21 pm]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
Cross server, cross game guild meeting to be held on ventrilo and transcribed in WoW on Uldaman. Please do your best to attend.ReneeGuild Mom
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OK my darlings	[May. 10th, 2011\|03:25 pm]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
[mood \|cheerful]The following link will give you a free 7 day trial on Rift. We are on Shadefallen, the RP server, and as always we are Decadence Inc. My mains are Neeree, Nelia and Magerre. Please come visit. We are Defiant. www.riftgame.com/en/products/ascend-a-friend/invite.php
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Rift Servers	[Feb. 23rd, 2011\|09:50 pm]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
Short update: Here are the server/faction combinations we'll be playingServer: Shadefallen, Faction: DefiantServer: Estrael, Faction GuardianBoth of these are role-playing servers. Rift seems to have the potential for more of the style of role play that Vinny and I are used to (we're both face-to-face role playing veterans). If role-playing doesn't happen, then oh well, we don't lose anything by being there.Nearly everyone I've talked to favors Defiant. I'm going to get the guild chartered on the Guardian side in case we want to play it later, but Decadence Inc's primary presence will be Defiant on Shadefallen. [Edit: Faeblight is the most overloaded server in the game. Moved the Guardian side to the new server, Estrael. Apologies to anyone who rolled on Faeblight, but nobody indicated they had.]
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Rift Servers

[Feb. 23rd, 2011|09:50 pm]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc

Short update: Here are the server/faction combinations we'll be playingServer: Shadefallen, Faction: DefiantServer: Estrael, Faction GuardianBoth of these are role-playing servers. Rift seems to have the potential for more of the style of role play that Vinny and I are used to (we're both face-to-face role playing veterans). If role-playing doesn't happen, then oh well, we don't lose anything by being there.Nearly everyone I've talked to favors Defiant. I'm going to get the guild chartered on the Guardian side in case we want to play it later, but Decadence Inc's primary presence will be Defiant on Shadefallen. [Edit: Faeblight is the most overloaded server in the game. Moved the Guardian side to the new server, Estrael. Apologies to anyone who rolled on Faeblight, but nobody indicated they had.]

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(no subject)	[Feb. 23rd, 2011\|06:06 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
The new MMO Rift launches on 3/1. People who pre-order can start playing 2/24 (Thursday). Renee indicated that there were people who wanted a report on the game after they found out I was in the beta. So, a ridiculously long report has in fact been created. You can get to it on my livejournal:Short history of Telara A WoW player's impressions of RiftI'm not quiting WoW, but I will be playing Rift also, and I will be creating a branch of Decadence Inc in Rift (probably 2, one faction per server, just like in WoW). I'll post here once I know the servers in case anyone is interested in Rift and wants to join us there.
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(no subject)

[Feb. 23rd, 2011|06:06 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc

The new MMO Rift launches on 3/1. People who pre-order can start playing 2/24 (Thursday). Renee indicated that there were people who wanted a report on the game after they found out I was in the beta. So, a ridiculously long report has in fact been created. You can get to it on my livejournal:Short history of Telara A WoW player's impressions of RiftI'm not quiting WoW, but I will be playing Rift also, and I will be creating a branch of Decadence Inc in Rift (probably 2, one faction per server, just like in WoW). I'll post here once I know the servers in case anyone is interested in Rift and wants to join us there.

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Free bags on Farstriders	[Jan. 19th, 2011\|09:42 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
I've made friends with a lovely high end tailor who has agreed to make runecloth bags for us on Farstriders. All I need is some rugged leather. If any of you with higher level characters would please log on over there and have a look around for any rugged leather you could send me (Goldhunter on Farstriders) I'd be ever so grateful. Renee
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Guild relaunch	[Jan. 18th, 2011\|09:50 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
[mood \|chipper] Like many who quit World of Warcraft for various reasons, with the new expansion "Cataclysm" I've returned. Love my Worgen warlock. Our guild, Decadence Inc. on Uldaman, was started from a post on bipolypagangeek in response to so many complaints about homophobia in other guilds. We grew quite large. I quit the game for real life reasons, and then returned a couple of times. During one of my absences, some drama blew the guild apart. Recently, my oh so handsome, low drama, and very bppg boyfriend, Terry, has taken over as guildmaster. We are rebuilding with the aim of having fun. We'd like to invite those who are playing WoW to join rejoin us. Please take a look at our new website decadence-inc.wowstead.com/ and see if you want to come play with us. We have a core group of 85s who want to raid, lots of toons in all other levels willing to join up for arenas, dungeon runs and questing. We also have a Horde guild on Farstriders where I've been indulging in my blood elf fetish and auction house wizardry. Looking forward to playing with some of you, ;)ReneeRenela and Renesee on UldamanGoldhunter and Nerea on FarstridersSorry for the almost duplicate post, but those that know me, know my typing sucks.
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Guild relaunch

[Jan. 18th, 2011|09:50 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc

[**mood** | chipper

chipper] Like many who quit World of Warcraft for various reasons, with the new expansion "Cataclysm" I've returned. Love my Worgen warlock. Our guild, Decadence Inc. on Uldaman, was started from a post on bipolypagangeek in response to so many complaints about homophobia in other guilds. We grew quite large. I quit the game for real life reasons, and then returned a couple of times. During one of my absences, some drama blew the guild apart. Recently, my oh so handsome, low drama, and very bppg boyfriend, Terry, has taken over as guildmaster. We are rebuilding with the aim of having fun. We'd like to invite those who are playing WoW to join rejoin us. Please take a look at our new website decadence-inc.wowstead.com/ and see if you want to come play with us. We have a core group of 85s who want to raid, lots of toons in all other levels willing to join up for arenas, dungeon runs and questing. We also have a Horde guild on Farstriders where I've been indulging in my blood elf fetish and auction house wizardry. Looking forward to playing with some of you, ;)ReneeRenela and Renesee on UldamanGoldhunter and Nerea on FarstridersSorry for the almost duplicate post, but those that know me, know my typing sucks.

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Apologies	[Dec. 13th, 2010\|07:39 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
A couple of things are behind schedule, so to speak, for reasons beyond my control. Very frustrating. Wowstead is having issues because Blizzard made armory changes right before Cataclysm released, and they've had to fix things and now are trying to resync 5000 guilds. Personally I think they have problems they haven't realized, because they forced a sync on our guild, and I can see lots of toons on the admin side, but the public roster still only has a single toon. Because of that, I haven't created a Wowstead site for the horde side yet.Additionally, I've set some guild ranks to require authenticators to protect the guild vault, in this day and age of hacked accounts. And the game won't let me promote characters into those ranks. There's a post out there that says they're aware of the issue but it clears itself up after 72 hours. Well, it's been that and it hasn't, and so I'll be opening a ticket. In the meantime, it has randomly let me promote a few toons, (The intent is for all or an officer's toons to be of that rank so that someone looking for an officer will be able to identify them, which I think is important if we're going to be recruiting.)Because of these issues, divaprime has not yet launched her recruiting effort.It's all very frustrating and it looks like I'm asleep at the wheel, so I wanted to explain,.Please bear with me.
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Apologies

[Dec. 13th, 2010|07:39 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc

A couple of things are behind schedule, so to speak, for reasons beyond my control. Very frustrating. Wowstead is having issues because Blizzard made armory changes right before Cataclysm released, and they've had to fix things and now are trying to resync 5000 guilds. Personally I think they have problems they haven't realized, because they forced a sync on our guild, and I can see lots of toons on the admin side, but the public roster still only has a single toon. Because of that, I haven't created a Wowstead site for the horde side yet.Additionally, I've set some guild ranks to require authenticators to protect the guild vault, in this day and age of hacked accounts. And the game won't let me promote characters into those ranks. There's a post out there that says they're aware of the issue but it clears itself up after 72 hours. Well, it's been that and it hasn't, and so I'll be opening a ticket. In the meantime, it has randomly let me promote a few toons, (The intent is for all or an officer's toons to be of that rank so that someone looking for an officer will be able to identify them, which I think is important if we're going to be recruiting.)Because of these issues,

divaprime has not yet launched her recruiting effort.It's all very frustrating and it looks like I'm asleep at the wheel, so I wanted to explain,.Please bear with me.

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Changeless changes	[Dec. 11th, 2010\|08:29 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc
Not much has really changed. silvrdragon has transferred the guild to me (and thank you so much for your work and effort up to now!). I've put up a new guild site with a few posts describing the guild, but they're really clarifications, not changes. Nothing's really changed except that some of our former members who we've missed have come back to us, which I couldn't be happier about, and so suddenly Decadence Inc feels like an active guild again.The new guild site is: decadence-inc.wowstead.com . The roster isn't updating yet (it syncs from the armory, which will be very cool, once it works), and I have an open ticket on that, so it looks like there's only one character in the guild (instead of 220), but I'm sure that'll be fixed presently. :) The intro posts are linked on the first page though.After things (mostly the wowstead site) stabilize, divaprime is going to do some recruiting for us, in much the same way she recruited our original player base. I know my last post was a bit gloomy, so if you've been watching here for developments, the guild hasn't really changed, but it does seem to have woken up. :)
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Changeless changes

[Dec. 11th, 2010|08:29 am]Bi Poly Pagan Geeks on WoW.... Decadence Inc

Not much has really changed.

silvrdragon has transferred the guild to me (and thank you so much for your work and effort up to now!). I've put up a new guild site with a few posts describing the guild, but they're really clarifications, not changes. Nothing's really changed except that some of our former members who we've missed have come back to us, which I couldn't be happier about, and so suddenly Decadence Inc feels like an active guild again.The new guild site is: decadence-inc.wowstead.com . The roster isn't updating yet (it syncs from the armory, which will be very cool, once it works), and I have an open ticket on that, so it looks like there's only one character in the guild (instead of 220), but I'm sure that'll be fixed presently. :) The intro posts are linked on the first page though.After things (mostly the wowstead site) stabilize,

divaprime is going to do some recruiting for us, in much the same way she recruited our original player base. I know my last post was a bit gloomy, so if you've been watching here for developments, the guild hasn't really changed, but it does seem to have woken up. :)

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