Well, Guild Oie Jedoonee has finally made the big time. We were mentioned in a commercial gaming print magazine called “Massive Magazine”. Here’s the quote (from Issue #2):

“It’s a fundamental rule in PvP that players are not equal,” says Ted Caldwell[sic], a software developer from Ottawa, Canada. Caldwell’s World of WarCraft guild, Oie Jedoonee, takes the high-level stuff so seriously that he’s got his wife leveling his characters for him when he’s too busy to grind it out himself. Playing at the highest levels, where it’s all about PvP, requires this kind of commitment. “Just a difference in level can be the difference between being wormfood and immortal,” he says.

Ted got seriously ribbed about whether or not we were actually a l33t PvP guild and whose guild it actually was. Although, I suspect we were mostly just jealous because we can’t get our wives to level our characters for us (hm… maybe Todd ;-)).

In Ted’s favour, he did claim that he was mis-quoted:

Fascinating. I’ve never been quoted out of context before; what a bizarre experience. 🙂

I never gave the impression that we were l33t (or serious). The question was one about differences in PvP between MMOs and shooters. The (full) answer was:

It’s a fundamental rule in MMO PvP that players are not equal. In a shooter, every player has the same basic abilities; they can jump the same height, shoot the same weapons, kill the opponents as quickly. In an MMO, that’s not the case. Even setting aside different equipment, just a difference in level can be the difference between being wormfood and immortal. Shooters reward practice; MMOs reward time spent. These aren’t necessarily fundamentally different – FPS practice requires time, and MMO PvPers need to practice their skills – but there are fundamental disparities between the way one becomes ‘skilled’ in the two kinds of PvP action. In theory, someone who has never played any given shooter could jump in and take down players who have years under their belts; that just can’t happen in MMOs. Similarly, a long-time MMO player who has spent very little time trying out PvP could easily beat players who have much more PvP time under their belts but not as much game time – newbies literally have no chance.

I never suggested that I actually did any of it. 🙂 (I also had to look this up, because I totally didn’t remember using the word ‘wormfood’.)

l33t PvPer and Guild PR Rep,
-Matchstick

Those were the immortal words I heard (er… read) when I first entered the Blood Elf newbie zone. And you know, they were right. I haven’t seen so many noobs in one place since the day EQ went live (ah, the gates of Qeynos, I knew you well).

This, of course, was after creating a new character on Hydraxis, one of the new servers that have been added along with the expansion. I didn’t have much hope of getting into Zul’jin — the queue was 680 when I tried and claimed I had a >1 hour wait. Hey Blizzard, Please split Zul’jin.

Update: So later in the evening, after an hour waiting, I finally managed to get on to Zul’jin, only to find that individual world servers (parts of the world) were crashing at a ferocious rate. End result: After creating a Blood Elf (rogue — *sigh*), then having the newbie zone crash 5 times, then taking Bais through the gate and having Outland crash, I gave up. Maybe the server patch tomorrow morning will help. Man, I hope so.