Alternatives to Azeroth

Good morning friends. We find ourselves in really difficult times, more specifically for those players who had a deep connection to World of Warcraft. One of the most interesting aspects surrounding the Warcraft universe is that there are so many players that were happily plugged into Azeroth without knowing much about the larger MMORPG scene. The game had a unique way of spreading from spouse to partner or to family members or maybe even to coworkers. The end result is that it created a large number of “Blizzard Gamers” that had never really played much prior to the game nor played much in addition to it. This morning’s post is specifically for the members of the Warcraft community that now find themselves in a troubling situation. For many playing Warcraft right now feels tainted, but at the same time the game became part of their self-care routine as a way to alleviate the stresses of the world.

Please note this is not a post telling people to abandon World of Warcraft. That isn’t something that I can tell anyone to do. Personally, I just can’t touch Blizzard products right now. Maybe if the systemic change goes into place and it seems like the company is on the right track again I can return, but for now, I am distancing myself. If you are feeling the same way, but also struggling to know what to do with your gaming time… this morning’s post is specifically targeted at you. As a long-time “WoW Tourist” I have played almost all of the MMORPGs that have come out throughout the years and I have great news for you. While Warcraft was consuming all of the discourse, there were a wide number of games that have quietly been gaining steam in the background. This morning I am going to talk about the games that I think specifically would be easy to move over to after coming from a World of Warcraft background.

The Lord of the Rings Online

This is one of the older games on this list and it is impossible to talk about without also talking about Lord of the Rings as a whole. This game was released on the heels of the extremely popular series of movies and had the challenge of creating a world that felt like said movies, but also had none of the licensing rights to the movie imagery. It is also very much a game of its era and if you were a huge fan of the way that Vanilla Warcraft and Burning Crusade felt, then you might possibly feel at home roaming this vast world. Enjoyment of the game however is greatly enhanced if you have a love of Tolkien because so many little details of the books are lovingly placed or recreated in this setting.

The story of Lord of the Rings Online is set as you being a contemporary of the Fellowship. This means throughout the course of its long tale you will be crossing paths with various members of the larger story. This gives the game leverage to let your character stray from the text, but still has a larger context of the events of the story we know so well. There are a number of extremely interesting character classes and rich crafting system and a functional but not phenomenal housing system. I think more than anything I fell in love with the world itself because it makes for an extremely interesting backdrop to your own character story. The game is showing its age, but especially if you were a classic player it might feel like home.

There is of course a free trial that lets you get in and start playing the game with an albeit limited set of character options and only the base content available. It has one of the more complicated pricing models in that each expansion is purchased separately, but there is a version of the game that includes the first six expansions for $59.99. If you choose to subscribe to unlock additional features it comes in at the standard $15 a month.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Did you ever want to play World of Warcraft circa Wrath of the Lich King but in a Science Fiction setting? Gratz then Star Wars the Old Republic is probably just the game for you. If you ever played through the much acclaimed Knights of the Old Republic RPG by Bioware, this game is set further down in that same timeline and as a result, references a lot of events from that KOTOR 1/2 setting. The only negative about Star Wars the Old Republic is that at this point in its lifespan it is largely a single-player MMORPG and has been retooled to support that playstyle. It features some of the deepest and most engaging storylines I have experienced in an MMO with each of the eight classes having its own completely unique character arcs that play out over the course of the base game.

It adds a lot of interesting things to the genre, like a Starfox-style arcade space combat mode and a deep companion system allowing you to customize them and augment your play. For example, if you are a squishy DPS and struggle while questing, then bring a healing companion or a tank companion to come to make that questing go a little bit more smoothly. There is a fairly rich crafting system, but it feels like it was largely abandoned once you left the base game. The game veers sharply into a completely single-player narrative once you reach the expansion content, but is still very much worth experiencing for yourself. It featured some really interesting group content at release but has been tuned in a way that most people just solo it these days.

There is a free trial that unlocks a limited subset of content and character options. One of the interesting things about Star Wars the Old Republic is that if you pay for a single month at $15, it permanently unlocks all of the expansion content and a number of the missing character options. Even more interesting about this game is it supports a $60 two-month subscription that does not renew, which tells me that Bioware fully understands that this is the type of game that folks dip their toes back into every now and then for a month or two at a time. There are ways to buy the game outright for $30 featuring all of the expansions, but really the better option is to simply pay for a single month of subscription time.

Neverwinter

Neverwinter is a bit of a mixed bag, but I feel like it is worth talking about nonetheless. The first two games in this sequence started their lives as a subscription model game and then were later converted over to free to play when the market proved that there could only be one “WoW”. Neverwinter on the other hand released as a purely free-to-play vehicle… and as a result, I would classify it as very “freemium”. You are going to be deluged with a bunch of nonsense that is associated with paid unlocks and priced-to-own features… including so many varied currencies that it is difficult to keep track of. if you can ignore all of this, the core gameplay loop is extremely enjoyable and it offers a more action roleplaying game take on what is the tried and true World of Warcraft formula.

The game releases content at pretty regular intervals and the moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable. Trying to sort out what it actually costs for anything from the store is completely incomprehensible. If you are looking for a fun game to get in and play for a while but don’t plan on it turning into anything more serious then Neverwinter might just be the ideal fit for you. It requires setting up an ArcGames account, which means that you are going to have to deal with Perfect World nonsense, but pending again that you can overlook that I’ve personally had a lot of fun with it. This is a game that I don’t see recommended as very awesome because you need to be willing to overlook a lot of those free-to-play flaws to find the diamond among the trash heap.

Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 is without a doubt the best deal in MMORPGs. I can say that statement without irony or subterfuge because the game legitimately is a “buy the box” and play the game type experience. The only caveats that I need to include with it, is that the game itself is vastly different from any other MMORPG on the market in the way it feels and the types of content that is available to the player. If you were a loremaster in World of Warcraft and got joy in ticking things off a list, then this might be the perfect game for you. If you loved World Quest content, then again this might be the ideal experience because pretty much the entire game is the equivalent of a World Quest. Guild Wars 2 presents you huge maps with lots of activities on them and reoccurring group events that you get credit for as you move your way towards “map completion”.

The game also does an excellent job of making sure there is always some objective that you could be working towards, presenting you with a menu of different achievements and collections to go out into the world and complete. It has an extremely rich crafting system and instanced nodes so you are never actually competing with players for resources. The gameplay itself however is a bit of an acquired taste with a character being made up of not only the class you choose but also the specific weapon combination you choose to go with it. I have to admit I have played a lot of Guild Wars 2 in spite of the fact that I still don’t really get the core draw of the experience. It has rich and acclaimed story content, that I have largely bounced off of, but those who love this game they are extremely devoted to it.

If you were a big PVP player in World of Warcraft this game is known for its rich Realm vs Realm vs Realm gameplay. Essentially think Alterac Valley, but something that people actually queue for and participate in as you have a big epic battle with other players over resources. Never really been my cup of tea but I know there are a good number of players that play Guild Wars 2 almost exclusively for this content.

Essentially as it stands right now there are two ways to buy into the experience. The first is an edition that includes the base game and the first two expansions for $29.99. If you are willing to spend a bit more you can buy a new multi-pack that includes the upcoming End of Dragons expansion releasing in February for $49.99. In addition to this, there is of course a cash shop with a large amount of account unlocks and cosmetics, that are in truth purely optional content. Some of the things like unbreakable harvesting tools are the awesome quality of life improvements but provide no real benefit over the base breakable tools in the game. Well worth giving a shot if you have never played before because it might just be the game you have been looking for.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Now we are getting into the games that I assume anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time knows I will be recommending. Something you need to understand about this game is that I love Elder Scrolls Online. I was a friend and family alpha tester, have two characters named after me, and have played it off and on since it was released. I am more than a little biased about this game, so you need to understand that going into this discussion. ESO was a critically panned game that managed to gain traction and absolutely mail a regular cadence of content releases. Essentially each year there is one large expansion and three smaller content drops, essentially meaning that every 3 months or so there is something new and exciting to engage within the game.

Classes in Elder Scrolls Online are more suggestions than actually locking you down to playing a specific role and if enough time is spent in the game you can earn more than enough points to buy your way into multiple functional specs. I personally main a Dragon Knight, and I can play that as DPS, Healer, or my role of choice Tank. The crafting system is probably my favorite from any MMORPG and the content is laid out in such a way that effectively all of it remains evergreen. Each zone drops specific gear sets and you can take a blue item and upgrade it all the way to the highest tier. This means players are always out in the world participating in content regardless of the zone, making the entire world feel vibrant and alive.

If you were a PVPer in World of Warcraft, this also might be a landing place for you given that it has an entire game mode centering around huge battles to seize control of Cyrodil. Three factions vie for control over Forts and Keeps, all while trying to earn the right to conquer the Imperial City in the center of the map. These campaigns come in seven days and thirty-day flavors and involve players needing to not only take territory but organize the holding of territory during off-hours. For those who are not into the big campaign, Cyrodil still serves as an interesting but dangerous land to explore and well worth doing so for all of the sky shards and little mini-dungeons found there.

Pricing for Elder Scrolls Online gets a little bit contorted. Essentially things are divided into two categories, Expansions which add large new areas to the world along with a new starter experience, and DLC which adds dungeons, raids, and smaller areas. There is an expansion every year and it comes with a standard new game price tag associated with it. DLC is purchased through the crown shop and is somewhere in the $15-$20 price tag depending on how elaborate it is. Alternately you can pay a $15 a month price tag which unlocks all DLC for the game along with your “ESO Plus” subscription. I keep this active if I am playing because it also gives you an unlimited crafting inventory allowing you to harvest until your heart is content without ever worrying about bag space. There is a multi-pack that includes Morrowind, Summerset, Elseweyr, Greymoor, and Blackwood for $59.99 which is the ideal way to buy-in.

Final Fantasy XIV

We have reached the point in this post where we finally get to the game that you all expected me to talk about before you clicked on the link. Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best games on the market and also one of the most endearing comeback stories the games industry has ever had. I say this with no hyperbole intended, this is probably the best MMORPG on the market and it is for a lot of reasons. This game is still a passion project of the team responsible for turning this game around from abject failure to overwhelming success, and for the most part, all of the key players are still actively engaged in creating new content. This team also sets the bar for transparency in information and honesty with its player base about what is going to work and what is not going to work. Players don’t always get what they want, but we often get a better understanding of why exactly we are not getting it.

The challenge with Final Fantasy XIV however is that it feels very much like playing an alternate universe version of World of Warcraft. There is no denying the influence that Warcraft had on Yoshi P while working on this game, but also at the same time there are just a lot of things that work completely differently coming from the Everquest derived lineage of Final Fantasy XI. Additionally, this is a game that was designed with the limitations of the PlayStation 3 in mind, so a number of the systems just don’t work quite in the same ways that a PC-focused MMORPG gamer would expect them to. Then there is the story gating of content that I talked about yesterday, and even though the said story is phenomenal… you cannot progress through good chunks of the game without making your way up to a specific point in the Main Story Quest or MSQ.

The reason why I love this game and keep coming back to it though is the community. There has been a careful focus by the team working on the game to lay the groundwork of shared struggle and kindness throughout the game. There is subtle social pressure to do good and be friendly, in the hopes that maybe just maybe at the end of a group activity you get a commendation from your players. Like it sounds silly, but in practice ends up curbing a lot of the animosity and toxicity that I have seen in other games. The content is also structured in a way so that doing older content is both enjoyable and rewarding and when you have a brand new player those rewards are increased. This has created an effect where running with a brand new player is actually sought after, rather than something you fear. Sure you need to spend a bit more time explaining mechanics, but you are going to get more of the end game currency you are chasing as a result to make it worth your while.

That is not to say that the game does not have its low points as well. Casual PVP is great and I find it very enjoyable, but I am not the traditional PVP player. From what I understand it is nowhere near as highly tuned as other games and as a result those who are more focused on that gameplay get frustrated by it. Housing in the game is one of the coolest systems, but because of the way that it is structure it is prohibitively expensive and just plain unavailable due to demand for most players. Apartments and Free Company rooms exist, but they feature a limited subset of the options that a traditional house would include. One of the huge benefits of the game is the ability to play every single job on a single character, but this is also somewhat of a double edged sword. Leveling your first job comes extremely quickly as you follow the MSQ, but alternative jobs are left hanging forcing players to significantly slower ways of leveling them.

All of that is pretty manageable, but without a doubt the most frustrating part about the game is the account system. Square created a system that would have felt needlessly arcane during the Web 1.0 days and now feels just painful to interact with. Those of us who have been around awhile understand the ins and outs of it… but account creation is the first real hurdle any new player might encounter. It also has a weird pricing model with subscriptions having a good number of asterisks out beside it. The game is $13 a month if you only one one character per server with a maximum of 8 characters in total. $15 a month gets you up to 8 characters per server (which honestly alting is a trap) and a maximum of 40 in total. Then you can pay an additional $2 per month to gain additional retainers or an addition fee to gain use of the mobile app that lets you play the market boards aka auction house remotely.

Right now the game is being deeply discounted due to a sale that is taking place. You can pick up the Complete edition that includes the base game, Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers expansions for $23.99 or the non-sale price of $59.99. Then come November if you are at that point in the game you will need to purchase the Endwalker expansion for $39.99. The Free Trial gives players access to the base game and the Heavensward expansion or the first 60 levels of the game, but comes with a bunch of restrictions limiting the player to 300,000 gil and cannot join Free Companies or send public messages like Shout, Yell or Tell. They are also now restricted with a longer queue time than paying customers. That said it is well worth trying the game for free in order to determine if it really is for you.

One of the things I realize upon making this post, is that I am going to have folks asking “What about X game”. The truth is there are literal hundreds of MMORPGs currently available, each with their positives and negatives. This is my personal take on the games that I think a World of Warcraft exclusive player would fit into most easily. If you have your own opinions for what you feel like are a better fit, as always feel free to leave a comment below. Once again this is not me trying to tell players that they need to leave World of Warcraft, but if you too are struggling with engaging with Blizzard right now… here are some alternative places you could find shelter in for the time being.

Captain K

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I am all over the map right now when it comes to video games.  I am in this weird holding pattern where I am playing a ton of different games, but none of them for terribly long in a single sitting.  I also managed to garbage out my left pinky this weekend which is making typing surprisingly painful.  Right now my average night involves at least one Kulve Taroth match in Monster Hunter World, and then flipping over Destiny 2 to try and score another powerful/prime engram for the evening.  From there I bounce all over the place… lately that has included some time spent in The Division which actually lead me to hit the level cap of 30 and start unlocking end game activities.  One of the things that I loved about this game was just how detailed its world was, in that it felt like a real place that I was going to visit.  Yes I realize it was patterned off of New York…  but I have supposedly visited New York in a bunch of different games and this was the first time it really felt like an actual place.  The game looks gorgeous at 4k… but then again so far MOST games look gorgeous at 4k.

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I poked my head into Neverwinter as well this weekend and finally claimed my Purple Owlbear mount from Twitch.  This game has a lot of positive things going on, but it is an inventory management nightmare…  which ultimately prompted my little burst of posts on twitter.  Inventory Management is just not something that is fun… and out of the tons of favorites I only got one person who chimed in stating that they actually like cleaning their inventory.  There are games where having a nonsense inventory is enough to make me log right back out, and many times… I feel this way about Neverwinter.  Side note another game that I often feel this way about is Everquest II because so much of what ends up dropping is not terribly useful, and when you can have bags that are getting close to 100 slots each…  you can carry around a lot of junk.  I think the theory is that people get excited when they see loot… but that excitement quickly passes when you realize that 99.9% of the stuff that drops is useless crap.

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Which leads me to Path of Exile… a game where the common practice is to install a loot filter so you just don’t see the useless shit you shouldn’t be looting in the first place.  I am using the NeverSink filter, largely because it seemed to be the one that was most widely recommended.  I will say however… it does greatly improve the experience… even though that I still feel like inventory space is a nightmare in this game.  I spent way more time this weekend playing POE than I expected, and I will say that the game has gotten significantly more enjoyable once I crossed the line into Act II.  Unfortunately I didn’t take many screenshots this weekend…  especially now that I apparently unleashed an ancient evil and blotted out the sun.  POE comes in both Grim and Dark flavors…  but apparently I shifted into Grim Dark mode.  The other issue that I have with POE is that my character looks stupid… which I realize is fixable if I drop a bunch of money on the cosmetic shop.  Right now I am wearing a leather diaper, plate booties, a metal old-timey football helmet…  while wielding a camp axe and a cabinet door for a shield.  This is not a good look on anyone…  and no matter how much gear I swap out I seemingly cannot get rid of the diaper.

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Lastly I am still spending quite a bit of time before falling asleep each night playing various mobile games and one of the ones that I am finding myself enjoying in spite of it not making any sense… is Lineage II Revolution.  During the podcast I talked a bit about this and apparently I completely missed the whole cookie clicker like games thing.  Games that play themselves are apparently a genre… and this one is weirdly enjoyable.  What I found odd though is once I hooked up ADB to play the game mirrored on PC from my phone… it had built in support for WASD so in theory…  this game was designed for a PC interface?  I am legitimately wondering about trying this through an emulator like Memu and mapping it in a fashion to allow for keyboard and mouse play.  At the moment you can do that… but it means you are clicking buttons on the screen instead of having things bound to mouse buttons/keys.  It is weirdly entertaining…  but it isn’t like I can actually suggest it as a “good” game.  It is pretty and some stuff is happening on screen but I am largely just letting it play itself since mobile controls are garbage.  Maybe that is the way these games are getting around that fact…  letting the game navigate for you and then just hit attacks periodically in a sort of on rails shooter type experience.

The Stronghold Chasm

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Last night I fell down an unexpected rabbit hole.  For a few weeks I have known that my good friend PizzaMaid has been dabbling in Neverwinter, but I did not actually know that we were apparently all playing on the same server until last night.  When I got upstairs to nom my noms and check into the world, I saw that she was streaming neverwinter.  Joining her were my friends and fellow Pom’s Wolfy, Jaedia and Starspun all logging in to run a dungeon in game.  We had some confusion earlier in the week as to which server we were all on, and I thought I remembered the name Dragon at some point.  Apparently yes we are all in fact on Dragon which allows us to do interesting things together.

I had my own renaissance of Neverwinter back in January as I installed and booted up the game on a whim.  For years I had been getting press releases about the game to my blogging/podcasting email and I guess over time it built up a desire to log in and see how things were going.  What I found when I got there was an extremely fun and also insanely intricate game…  that I struggled to grasp.  I already thought there was a wide chasm of features and functionalities that I did not quite understand…  but I was apparently only on the rim of said chasm.  Last night we full well opened the maelstrom and hopped right in.

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One of the activities were partook of was forming a guild, so as of last night the Owlbear Preservation Society lives in Neverwinter with the aforementioned members as the inaugural group.  This unlocked the ability to start messing around with our Stromhold which is essentially the equivalent of the Guild Hall in Guild Wars 2.  Now I had been carrying around items that assisted in the function of a guild hall for ages, likely since the game originally launched.  The problem is I never actually had a guild to spend them on… so I spent the first few minutes of my time in our stronghold trying to figure out what to do with them.

It turns out you feed them to the mimic friend that we are all taking a screenshot with, and he then applies them to the various costs associated with building things back to their grand status.  I thought Guild Wars 2 had a pretty deep rabbit hole when it came to a guild hall… but this one might be deeper.  The problem is at this moment we have only barely scratched the surface and unlike Guild Wars 2… there are no really easy gains that can be applied and instead everything seems to be pretty slow to acquire.  Right now we are being directed to build a lumberyard, which seems to be capable of producing at least some of the materials we need to start crafting things.

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Everything that is flagged with a green icon has a placard in front of it allowing us to build it.  I am guessing everything marked with a grey X is something that will eventually unlock… once we have built up a certain number of things in our Stromhold.  This is a really deep well we have fallen into and I am not entirely certain we will really make much headway.  The collection of items seems to be through “daily quests” of a sort that reset every 9 hours in the Stronghold.  I will not be playing actively enough to do these on cool down, however considering most of the activities are pretty chill I am likely to do a set of them each time I log in.

The biggest problem we have currently is the fact that there are only five of us and this seems to be a design feature that is intended to be sped through by mass amounts of players doing these and funding the building coffers.  I have no clue how wide this madness will spread, but I somehow doubt we will have a mass influx of players like we have had when a new game launches.  I might be wrong, but I am guessing this is going to be a pretty low key grind that takes place over several months.

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As far as the rest of my play session, I managed to ding 41 and now that we have our stronghold… I can see that the level cap is 70.  The Stronghold itself is populated with tons of heroic encounters designed for a balanced group of players to go out and tackle which is fairly slick.  We downed a few of them and failed one major event largely because we didn’t really know what the purpose was until it was a bit too late.  It was a really fun night of nonsense and it has sparked my desire to poke my head into Neverwinter more often now that I am actually part of a guild.

Sword Coast Chronicles

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Do you know how hard it is for me to say Neverwinter… and not follow it up with Nights?  Like that is hands down the hardest thing about playing the Cryptic made MMO…  is just stopping with the first word.  Like part of me feels like it would have simply felt better to call it Neverwinter Nights Online, but I am guessing that Bioware probably still has the licensing rights to “Neverwinter Nights”.  Regardless of this personal struggle I find myself suddenly unable to stop playing this game.  I am not really sure what is going on there but I am having a lot of fun and the content just seems to be flowing smoothly in a way it never did the few other times I tried to play it.  Everquest II had this concept of the golden path where a sparkly line of particle effects would attempt to lead you from objective to objective.  The problem is it never really worked right and was prone to completely abandon you if the effects clipped through the terrain, or simply route you in a truly bizarre manner.  As a result I think when I first saw that Neverwinter had a similar construct… I largely tried to ignore it after all of the bad experience attempting to make it work in EQ2.  The main difference is that here it actually works remarkably well, and while it might not be the most optimal path for questing purposes…  it does end up giving you a nice path to follow that eventually ends in you getting all of the objectives you need to knock out those quests.

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I had so many quests that were either partially completed or not even started scattered throughout a bunch of zones.  I am guessing I mostly ran around and killed stuff without really focusing on completing anything.  The problem with returning to a game after a significant amount of content has been added is you are never quite certain if something was in the game when you last played… or if you had just been completely oblivious to it.  One of these for me is  the introduction of the Sword Coast Chronicles tab which shows your general progress through the game, or at least what you should be working on content wise at a given level.  The only problem with this is that I am progressing way faster level wise than the content would in theory suggest.  I’ve been working on Neverdeath Cemetery still within the confines of Neverwinter proper.  If I had to guess I am now entering the second half of the content in that zone and should begin to start ticking off some of the boxes needed for the completion rewards.  So far the thing that is making this game stand out for me is just how interesting the locations are and how relatively densely packed they are with interesting vistas.  The one gotcha here is that the zones are not really as open as they might seem at first glance but instead in truth are more corridors to move through in a similar fashion to the zone design in something like Destiny 2.  So long as you treat the zone as a conduit to do the quests it feels really good…  when you start trying to break out off the beaten path and just traverse the zone without a purpose however it begins to feel frustrating and confining.

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Another thing I remember about this game is that it seemed really scarce with loot drops and at some point they went in completely the opposite direction.  I am getting more than enough gear from just running about to stay constantly upgraded and in the short time I have played I have gotten three different mounts as world drops and two companions.  There are entire subsections of this game that I have no clue what is even going on… like I vaguely remember there being some sort of web based component to this game.  I keep getting crafters and such from quests but I have no clue how to access it.  I attempted to do a little research yesterday but was constantly confronted with several year old information, so I am guessing the game just does not have much of a informational community presence.  Reading back through my original reviews of the game…  I seem to have thought it was an enjoyable experience each time I have attempted to play it.  The problem is I never really stick to it for one reason or another.  It already feels like I have gained way more traction in the game than any of my other efforts given that I logged in at level 16 Monday and now am just shy of level 30.  There are still a lot of ways that I feel like I don’t really know what the hell is going on, but I am slowly getting acclimatized to the game and feeling like I at least know my way round a bit.  The Dungeons I have run have been a mess… but the sort of mess where one person who is grossly overpowered just speed burns through the content and we sorta follow along haplessly looting shit.  At some point I want to check out the user created content that I know at some point went into the game.  I know my friend Tipa was super into that for awhile, so I am interested to see what playing that is like.  All in all I am still having a lot of fun, and probably just as shocked as you are to be seeing more Neverwinter posts.