Out of the closet

Imagine you and me meet in a virtual world and have some sort of dispute, like the typical guild drama. And I go and blog about that dispute, ranting, telling only my side of the story, and naming you with character name, guild name, and server. My blog has a Google page rank of 5, if you have a half-way original name my rant about you would probably top any Google searches on it. And even if you replied in the comment section, I would have the power to delete that post. This sort of one-sided publication power tends to make people nervous, so since some guild drama a few years ago I have a strict "no names" policy on this blog. My European WoW / WAR guild knows who I am, but I'm not using Tobold as character name except for bank alts, and I'm not mentioning the name of my characters, or other player's characters, nor guild names, nor server names on my blog. In the virtual world I'm a closet blogger.

For the US version of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning I'm making an exception to that rule. I am playing a Bright Wizard named Tobold on the Averheim server, and I'm a member of the Casualties of War guild. The reason I'm out of the closet there is that half of the bloggers in the MMO blogosphere are also members of that guild. In the event of a guild drama, everyone will be able to post his version of events on his blog, which will probably lead to the MMO blogosphere exploding. :) But with everyone else blogging about his participation in CoW, there was no reason for me to hide it.

Not that I expect to be involved in some guild drama, I probably won't even see much of the guys there during the week, because of the time zone difference. Weekends might be different. Yesterday I actually leveled Bright Wizard Tobold more than my Shaman on the European servers. I had some hickups with my router before I reset it, and Destruction being more crowded than Order, the wait time to get back into the game were much shorter for the Bright Wizard than for the Shaman, who waited in queue for half an hour after every disconnect. So most of the night I had two copies of WAR running in windowed mode, each connected to a different continent. And the game ran just fine! I'd say WAR is having a good launch.