[DONE] Oldie but Newbie

[Jellybug]

Howdy, all.

I'm looking to sign up with a TOG group in Guild Wars. I've played to within minutes of my free trial expiration, and I'm almost sold on buying the games. Probably soon after a browse through these forums, Amazon and NewEgg will be putting packages together for me.

I have to confess to playing Runescape for a while. It was a little fun while it lasted, I made some serious progress, but ultimately it turned me off of MMO for what I thought might be all time. As far as online gaming goes, I'm about as close to a total noob as you all could ask for.

Guild Wars looks different, since once you get to actual game play, it's a CRPG you can do with a few others. Or not, if you like. I'm just leery of having to play with unknown others, and decided on this gang as the likely best fit for me. Wish I'd found a suitable group for Diablo back in the day. What a mess that was.

My days go way further back than 1st-gen Battle.net servers, though. We were the proud owners of a Magnavox ping pong game system, which could amazingly also do tennis, volleyball, and handball - all encoded on removable circuit boards. Battery-powered.

Old school.

Shortly thereafter during a stint with the Boy Scouts, I was shown Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Not the 2nd Edition. Not the revised cover with the orange spine. This one.

Old school.

I owned one of the first 1,000 Commodore 64s ever built (believe mine was #000595 if memory serves), had the cassette tape drive long before the 10-pound 5.25 floppy was available, and was quite the little LOGO programmer. How many can say that they've saved code on a cassette?

Old school.

Then, an amber-screen 8086, a 286, a 486, a Pentium, ... (insert 8 more PCs here) ..., overclocked i7.

I've recently gone through Dragon Age, a heavily modded Fallout 3 (including a replay of Fallout 1 and 2 for completeness), and will occasionally start up Torchlight or Sacred for less story and more hacking. Sometimes an RTS title will distract me for a bit, like Anno 1404, Age of XYZ, Sins of a Solar Empire, even Chessmaster. More rarely a FPS will serve for stress relief, Far Cry 2, Splinter Cell, etc.

I'm here at TOG for the Guild Wars help I'm sure I'll need. I know there's much in the game you simply can't do without others, and I'm usually a go-everywhere do-everything kind of player. I'd rather not rely on a highly random and likely annoying roll of the dice once I log in. There also seems to be an emphasis on "best current meta-game PvP builds" and not so much "generally helpful tips on getting started" when it comes to available guides and posted info, so friendly pointers will be appreciated.

I'm a math & computer professor at a college in the Philippines. My spouse has the real job that moves us all around. My daughter (turned 5 today) is still on edutainment titles, but might have some gamer in her. I'm American, but haven't lived in the US for 14 years or so. My play times jump all over the place, so I'll not likely match up with any guild based on time zones. Thankfully there's the Alliance channel.

Might be a while before I can play, unless I put up the extra cash on the downloads from PlayNC. Ugh, looks like I'm a few weeks too late for a $14.99 deal on the Trilogy at Best Buy!

Thanks much, and merry Christmas!

Jellybug

[Monty]

Hi Jellybug,

Welcome to TOG, your application has been reviewed and approved.

You now have full access to all parts of TOG including:

• All TOG member only Forums
• All TOG member only areas of the website
• All TOG member only game divisions
• All TOG game servers

Your membership also includes access to various get-together, events, contests, and other exclusives for this 25 and over only organisation.

For a complete list of everything your membership includes along with everything you might want to know in order to take advantage of your new membership, be sure to stop by to read the "New TOG Members' Guide"

Currently TOG consists of nearly 30 game divisions and over 43,000 registered members. There's also plenty of other cool stuff on TOG, so browse around & check it all out. We sincerely hope that you enjoy TOG for as long as you choose to. Feel free to spread the message to your friends and family who enjoy gaming and don't forget to have fun yourself!

All the best!

The Older Gamers

[inoshiro]

Welcome to TOG Jellybug and since you've already found your way to the GW division, welcome to TOG GW too By the way my first C64 had the tape drive too. Fun times

[Pumpkin Lykos]

Welcome Jellybug

[Jellybug]

Thanks mucho, guild-mates.

Inoshiro, I missed out on a lot of the fun times with the cassette drive. People outside the States had third-party 'speed loader' programs that improved on the drive's already blazing 300-baud transfer rate. There was even a Brit company that put a loader program on their games that had a mini-game you could play while waiting for the real game to load!

In the US, we had pretty early access to the 1541 floppy drive at decent prices, so our cassette era was thankfully short-lived. We also had lots of dial-up BBS's to mess with at the time, so my Vicmodem was way more fun than the cassette drive.

...

Yeah, I don't think I could possibly portray myself as any more nerdy.