Anybody up for playing an online role playing game together?

[oldbutwise]

Is anybody up for playing an mmorpg (massively multiplayer online role playing game) together? We could start our own guild just for the members of these forums, and anybody else Trinity thinks would be good to have as guild members. I'd volunteer to be the guild leader. I'm up for free and pay to play games. Just let me know what type you'd like to play and I'll come up with a list of good games.

OK, you may have two questions. 1) What the heck is an mmorpg? 2) What the heck is a guild?

1) An rpg (role playing game) is a fairly unique genre of computer game. (They also have mmorpgs for android phones if anybody's interested.) MORPGs are role playing games that you (normally) can only play online. Where I live the slowest broadband internet you can get is 50Mbps which is a tad slow but definitely playable, so you don't need the fastest internet available. You do need a graphics card though (integrated graphics won't usually work but if you do any graphics work you should be set.) And if your desktop/laptop only has integrated graphics we can play mmorpgs on our android phones; just check the game specs before you play. You create a character and choose a class. Your class determines what your character does in the game. There's a few different classes but I'll just mention 3 for brevity. If you want to kill things with a sword you'd choose a fighter class. If you want to kill things using magic like Gandolf you'd choose a mage character. If you don't mind killing things but you'd rather heal your friends' wounds and cast spells to make them stronger, you'd choose a cleric. (In most games religion isn't even mentioned, so don't worry about that.) In most games you can choose a race, which almost always includes humans and elves but can include other races as well. NPCs (computer characters) give you tasks, like the stereotypical "kill 10 wolves" quest, which you do and then your character gets stronger. The stronger your character the more powerful the enemies you can kill. RPGs are all about story. An rpg with a bad story doesn't stay around very long. In some rpgs you can make your own weapons, armor, and potions to heal you. It's by far my favorite genre and I've ben playing computer games since 1980 and dungeons and dragons since around 1987.

2) A guild is simply an organized group of players. Guild members chat in their own channel that nobody else has access to. You can group up with other guild members to complete quests, people in other guilds (or no guild at all), or a mix.

So why am I suggesting mmorpgs? Because almost all people who play mmorpgs know that you can't tell a thing about the player just because of the gender of the character. There are a few who still think that way but most of them are young guys 23 or younger. And that's just a small subset of them too. Nobody asks what you gender is because nobody cares. If you want to play male characters, female characters, or a mix (I tend to choose my character's gender only after I've decided what I want that character to be or if I have a really great name that I just have to use, like MadamBovary for a bow user. Madame Bovary is a famous Italian opera BTW.) And nobody cares who the player is as long as you're a nice person. If you get a reputation as a jerk nobosdy will have anything to do with you. And the vast majority of players are very willing to help new players as long as you're up front about being new or not having much experience.

The guild leader (sometimes called the guild master) decides who can and can't join the guild. And they make that decision on a case by case basis.

When I'm feeling feminine I play Amber Starr on The Elder Scrolls Online. When I'm feeling masculine I play Smiling Sam. Other times it's how the spirit moves me. So it's a safe way to play characters of whatever gender you choose (and you can only choose male or female) in peace. And having our own guild means we can chat without anybody else listening in.

[Yuki]

I play. I have a character on Elder Scrolls. I also have other games. The only ones I don't play currently are ones that cost monthly to play. Paying monthly just isn't worth it right now.

I recently got Boundless. I have a house I've been building on there that is now considered a settlement, but it's kind of a dead game right now. They're trying to fix and change some things before they try to get a bunch of new players, I think.

I also just re-downloaded Anarchy Online. That's an old one... I haven't played it in probably about 14 years, but I'm bored.

I've also played pretty much all of the free ones.

I also have Guild Wars 2, and Archeage Unchained, and Black Desert. I think that covers all of the buy to play ones I have. I also have Ark, but I haven't really messed with it.. it seems really complicated and my computer doesn't handle it very well anyway. And Goat Simulator! Lol, for some random fun that's good for killing a few minutes of time.

Lord of the Rings Online is also fun, until you hit the point where you have to start paying for stuff to keep going, because it can be a little expensive to buy the quest packs and everything. But it's still a favorite, even though I never did buy any of those.

[oldbutwise]

I've played most of those games too. Have you played the original ArcheAge? The woman in green in the middle of the group (The Goddess?) in the loading screen looks exactly like somebody took a photo of my niece and ran it through a Photoshop filter so it would look hand drawn. My sister says she doesn't see it but my mother agrees with me 100%.

What's your character's name on ESO? I haven't played it since just before Greymoor went live because I still can't convince my nephew to play it again. But I have up through Elseweyr. My crafting alt (he used to be my main but he's an orc and so ugly I bought a suit of armor in the shop and don't ever take his helmet off) can craft weapons and armor at least in the low to mid teens so any time you're on just ask Harrik Elfsbane and I'll craft you whatever you want no charge.

And I have Guild Wars 2 but I don't think I'm current on that one. If you ever want to play one of those or anything else together just let me know. I prefer the fantasy games to sci-fi but I'd be willing to give Anarchy Online another try.

I used to love LOTRO until the jerks bottomed out the auction house. I used to grow crops and make a little profit that way. I wasn't getting rich but it was worth the effort. I haven't checked it out in years but the last time I checked you made out about the same selling crops on the auction house as selling them to a vendor. I had 2 paid acounts and 1 free account up until that happened. Up until I started playing LOTRO I really wasn't interested in watching the movies. Back in the 70s when I was a kid they made a really bad cartoon movie of The Hobbit. It was so bad I lost all interest in The Lord Of The Rings. After playing the game I bought all 6 movies (I still haven't watched them though; 2.5 hours each, oof) and all the books on either my Nook or Kindle app.

I used to be big into Everquest 2 but when I got my new computer it wouldn't run. It installed fine but the stupid thing just wouldn't run. I begged the company to tell me how to get it to run, that I wanted to give them my $15 every month, but they kept ignoring everybody.

What's the specs of your rig? I bought a new Skytech Archangel computer from Amazon back in July. It's $625 now and the monitor I went with is $90 but it still runs almost everything I want to play. It's got a Ryzen 1200 procesor and an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. I could have paid more to get a GTX 1060 but that only has 3GB of RAM where mine has 4GB. I don't play anything cutting edge so the 1050 Ti works well for me and I figure down the road I'll get more use out of the extra memory than I will going for the 1060. By then I'll probably want to get a new rig anyway. And Amazon will let you pay for the computer for 5 months at $125 a month, no credit check required.

[Raksha]

I know this thread may not have been updated in a while, but I play Elder Scrolls Online (on the EU server) and up for anyone to add me on there. My ESO username is Raksha _Shadow and I am also on the online gaming platform Steam if anyone wants to add me on there let me know.