After conducting these two interviews with SWTOR GM’s of Reality Check and Nostrum Dolus I can’t help but wonder about the differences between the two. In this bonus post I will briefly discuss the differences in the two leader types. Why? Because the two personalities presented are not only interesting when discussing leadership in-game but in general as well.
“Between men and women there is no friendship possible.There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.”
-Oscar Wilde
Is this statement true or false?
Oscar Wilde is one of my favourite authors of all time. That kind of intelligence and wit together with the power to express it in words is nothing but attractive. It’s a shame for women everywhere that he is gay… and dead of course, that’s another complication.
As gamers we are used to adopting new identities. We then discard them the same way a snake sheds it’s skins. We change between personalities as often as a girl changes her clothes. Want a make-over? Start playing a new game or create a new character. You can be the hero of Gotham City, you can be Ronaldo, you can be Lara Croft. Or maybe you just want to be a more ideal version of yourself. The possibilities are endless. This begs the question – As gamers, are we all suffering from some strange form of multiple-personality disorder?
For myself, I’ve never felt all my (sometimes wildly opposing) personality traits fit very well into just one person. As a result of this, as well as being a very playful person in general, I have gone by many different names – both in games and in real life.
After a Skype chat with Ravs about gaming and blogging we decided to write a twin piece about in-game leadership – specifically that required when leading a guild in SWTOR. She would focus on PvE guilds and me PvP. My very first thought was that I would love to get an interview with the GM of old Reality Check; a guild which gained it’s reputation on the server for putting up a fight against Nostrum Dolus. By going from occasionally queuing with unfavourable compositions Autumn 2012 to being a force to be reckoned with on TOFN by mid 2013 RC managed to establish themselves in the top tier bracket. With 60+ members, a lot of which were extremely strong minded, stubborn individuals, how does one manage the guild and keep it together?
Since the removal of 8v8 warzones the guild has unfortunately been mostly inactive. Being new to the game this interview would be especially interesting to me since I was not around at the time of ranked 8v8. Getting it however was not easy, I had to use all my powers of persuasion, but luckily for me I somehow tend to get what I want in the end. Rummel, GM of RC, finally agreed to conduct the interview with me under the condition that his friend, confidant and Co-GM Anthis could join – a condition I was happy to agree to.
As a part of our theme week focusing on SWTOR and Ranked PvP previous to patch 2.0, I decided to write a piece about the rules that were agreed upon back in the beginning of year 2013. Anthis from Reality Check and Mylex from TWATS were two of the people present at the meeting held setting the terms of this agreement. Last Friday I brought them both on the GD TS hoping to find out more.
Mylex begins by telling me that before the server transfers between Nightmare Lands and TRE there was some but not much in terms of ranked activity on TRE. When the server merges happened the best team on TRE was LotD and on Nightmare Lands it was Nostrum Dolus. Mylex continues to explain that LotD didn’t do that well against ND in those first few days of queuing and subsequently over a period of time fell apart. A few of their better players moved to ToFN for a time. Eventually RC started queuing but up until then the only other regular teams were ND and TWATS.
I’m excited to announce GD’s first theme week which will start day after tomorrow on Monday the 13th. We will be focusing on SWTOR, specifically Ranked PvP previous to patch 2.0. Below is what you can expect to see this coming week.
Monday 13th: 8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 1 (Why our server was better than yours) by Mylex
We are starting the week off by welcoming Mylex to the GD family with his first guest post. Interested in the player involvement needed to get ranked PvP in SWTOR off it’s feet I asked Mylex to share his experiences of ranked back in the days of 8v8.
Tuesday 14th: 8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 2 by Mylex
The end of Mylex story as well as some advice to anyone looking to try to make competitive PvP happen.
Thursday 16th: “Rules of conduct” and Ranked by Noctua
January 26th, 2013 members from RC, TWATS and ND held a meeting agreeing upon a list of rules that would improve the state of PvP which was suffering from heavy imbalance between classes. Yesterday I brought Mylex and Anthis to the GD TS and asked them questions about this occurrence. In this post we will go over what happened at the time as well as encourage a discussion about rules and agreements for ranked PvP in games like SWTOR.
I would really like to give a shout out to this artist I recently found!
Leilani Amorey is an artist and illustrator, living in the South of England. On Lei’s website she describes herself like this:
“I works hard and try not to take myself too seriously. I am also a hobbit, a blogger, a Tolkien fan, and a LOTRO player. Professionally I am an Online Community Manager and Illustrator , and I have spent the last 10 years working in gaming communities, making art, baking muffins, reading and collecting Tolkien’s books, and gaming (mainly in LOTRO and Landmark).”
If you like me have a weakness for water colours and all things Middle Earth then you should really have a look at the pictures below.
“Once upon a time there lived a hobbit…just please, remember, what you read here is not the whole story. My life might look sometime like it’s all fairy tales and lovely ‘hobbity’ things, but fairy tales never work without trials, some sadness and a few tears every now and then. Despite that however, I’d rather prefer to show the bright side of things. So this is ‘me’ , a hobbit with the passion for drawing and painting the world of Middle-earth…and a fairy tale or two. – Lei”
Here are some pictures from Lei’s “The Hobbit Project” which she is currently working on:
You can find Leilani Amorey on twitter here. Also follow this link to go to the website to check out Leilani’s blog and other work!
I was always quite skeptical to the concept of so called “tweets” which rarely seemed to hold much meaning in their 140 characters. If you’ve read my blog posts you know that expressing deep meaning with just a few words was never an art I mastered. For the sake of the blog however I reluctantly resigned to my fate as a “twitter user”. I have now found that sometimes interesting things do surface, even on twitter. About two weeks ago something caught my attention.
Laurie M @Lawilc01 Randomly reading an MMO Champ thread about raiding, just found out there’s an EU WoW guild specifically for people w/ social anxiety.
I instantly knew that I needed to get myself an interview with someone from this guild. It was too interesting to pass up. So I wrote the GM who was friendly and very helpful.
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Guild: Paranoid – GM: Mipsy
Server: Emerald Dream EU
Main faction: Alliance
Game: World of Warcraft
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On Paranoid’s website the following description is given of the guild:
“Paranoid is a guild for the socially awkward, the shy, the people who’d like to raid, but get a headache just thinking about all the things they could screw up. The people who type a message to someone who’s LFM in trade, then backspace, then type, backspace, type, stare at what they’ve written, backspace again and go quest on their own. And if they do press enter, they’re relieved if they get the reply: ‘Sorry, full.’
Last night I had a dream I did not enjoy. In it I was having a conversation with a particularly irrational person who insisted on things that were so illogical that I simply thought to myself: “This is impossible, I’m just going to wake up now because there’s no point to this conversation”. So I did. When awake I realised that by telling myself to wake up I must have been aware of my dreaming state. A lucid dream in other words. How long had I been aware of the fact that I was dreaming I wondered. The whole night? I kept thinking about the subject of lucid dreaming as I stared up at the ceiling unable to fall back asleep. Eventually I got up. Some late-night (or rather early-morning) browsing of the Internet showed me that “hardcore” gamers (characterized in part by regular playing sessions of more than 2 hours, several times a week) are more prone to lucid dreaming than the average person. Could this be true? It’s a captivating thought indeed.
Psychologist Jayne Gackenbach and her colleagues found many effects that gaming seem to have on our dreams in their research.
A lot of research done on gaming is focused on its harmful effects. Our self-esteem and social life is known to suffer especially from MMOs. So why do people want to game? Are we simply satisfying our human, self-destructive nature by doing so? Or is it just maybe possible that gaming can have positive effects on its “victims”? Could it help us better our image of ourselves?
Last week I wrote an article regarding some research done by Barmy on the connection between online gaming, self-esteem and escapism. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. After looking closer at this subject and discussing it further with Barmy a lot of thoughts came to me. In this part two of the article I will explore these questions and reflect deeper on my own ideas about gaming and how it relates to self-esteem.