*blows dust off blog console*  Hello?  Does this thing still work?

Its been a while.  It is funny coming to my blog and seeing my latest post being about the release of WoW’s 3.3 patch.  However, life being the way it is, stuff happens.  Back in December we had a nasty pipe burst incident at my house, causing flooding in our basement that was distracting.  Then there was the end of year push at work to wrap things up before the holiday breaks.  Distracting.  Then there was the holidays themselves.  Ugh.  Oh!  Did I mention that in early January we had a son?  Yeah, busy.

A lot has happened to me in that time.  I am not playing WoW anymore.  I am not saying that I have quit for good, but after 3.3 hit I just completely burned myself out on both PvP and all the heroic dungeons.  The guild I was in made it abundantly clear that they would rather run their core 10 people in 10 mans, AND their alts rather than work on expanding the guild by either making a 25 man group, or at least another 10 man group.  It kinda sucked because there were many extremely well geared members having to pug raids weekly who were ready to go with a new 10 man group.  The leadership just isn’t there.

So I took a break and played some single player games for a while (Dragon Age).  After a little while, as is always the case when my WoW mania fades, my Everquest mania crops up.  So I decided to resub to EQ2 for a while.  I wanted a fresh, new start so I rolled a brandy new Shadowknight on the Antonia Bayle server.  That lasted a few days before inspiration hit me to play a ranger.  So I rolled a ranger.  Say hi Ranger:

Daeran, The Ranger

I am having a blast playing him.  It helps that I moved to the Antonia Bayle server.  I had heard that Antonia Bayle was THE happening server and a lot of cool people from the blogosphere play there, however, I was still surprised at just how active the server is!  There are people everywhere and the chatter level is high.  I tend to solo whenever I can in modern MMOs.  Its not an anti-social thing, it is a time constraint thing.  I might have to disappear to feed a baby or help with something at the drop of a hat.  Being tide to a group makes it difficult.  However, it is essential that I have chatter going on around me.  Otherwise I begin to feel so lonely.

After playing the ranger for a few weeks now, I am hooked enough that I broke down and pre-ordered the collector’s edition of Sentinel’s Fate.  Yeah, collectors edition of an expansion FULL of content … that I wont be touching for MONTHS since it is all high level.  I can’t help it.  I really wanted that Evercracked DVD, and the new mount sounds neat, and … I am such a corporate shill.

My EQ2 subscription did end up turning into a Station Access subscription, as is always the case when I resub after a long break.  I have been dabbling in EQ1 and I logged in to Vanguard to get my 3rd anniversary bag thing.  Vanguard depresses me, but I will go into details on that in a separate post.

Other than that, I activated my EVE online account finally and have been going through my 30 free days.  I love the game, but I find it hard to sit down and play it for hours on end.  I log in, do a few things, set some skills and then I am good for a while.  It is a great game though, but I just find myself easily distracted from it.  Hopefully I will have some posts about my experiences in EVE soon.

P.S. – Yes, I did buy the Kelethin Outriders appearance armor set.  Thanks to the connecding! promotion they have going on, I had been granted some station cash.  I bought the armor and had 200 points left over even.