Why I'm not currently testing the Slayer.

This is weird. Very weird. It's just that I'm not on the PTS, playing the crap outta the new careers. Why? Well, its a bit complicated. First off I have a strange desire not to "spoil" anything for myself. I want my first login on the Slayer to be a completely new and fresh experience. But in the back of my head I have a little voice telling me I need to get on the PTS, for multiple reasons. For one thing, I can finalize my Slayer design, as I'll have access to all the needed tattoo art and other details I need to finish my character's design for the comic. Also, I can give useful feedback, as I pride myself on being really good about bug reporting, class feedback etc. None of this "OMG Slayers nedd a buff now our Deeps is teh suck!!" I can only imagine what the PTS forums are looking like about now, Although from my brief sojourn on the official forums I can see that Mythic is not playing around when it comes to deleting/locking flames and stupid trolling posts. Kudos to them. The WoW forums were such a cesspool because of this lack of efficient moderation.

Strangely, I'm not in a hurry to try out the Choppa either. I'm still keeping up with all the game news, browsing multiple forums and websites to soak up information as it is released. I'm still committed to playing the game, although a recent change in my work schedule has limited my evening playtime. I expect to get back on track once my body fully acclimatizes to waking up early or when the Bitter Rivals event begins, whichever comes first.

In a way, I'm glad we have tons of people on the PTS testing away. Mainly because a lot of these players are interested primarily in trying something new, but aren't really going to be making the Slayer or Choppa their main. Of course, I'm sure we will see the same pattern of activity that immediately followed the release of the Blackguard and Knight of the Blazing Sun. Namely, we'll see tons of Slayers and Choppa in Tier 1, and early Tier 2, with numbers dropping into Tiers 3 and 4. At least, the PTS lets people get it out of their system, or decide whether or not they want to stick with the new classes.

With any luck, the event will go live sooner rather than later, and when it does I'll be hopping on and getting that influence. I want my Slayer on day one baby. Thank god the weekend is coming up, that ouughta give me a good amount of playtime, I need to get back in the groove.

Aaarrgh!

Here we go again. My Destruction guild has had the worst luck with picking servers since launch. We were originally on Ulthuan, then moved over to Red Eye Mountain. Now server transfers have been opened up from REM to more populated servers, like Iron Rock and Monolith. We are preparing to pick a server again, but in the meantime... Well my destro guild has had some big highs and low lows in our time. We went from being a 300+ member guild shortly after launch, to having a huge drop-off in active players after the free month was up. We had some hardcore players split because we were primarily casual, and finally server population issues forced us to move to Red Eye Mountain.

Once on Red Eye. we experienced several cycles of more hardcore members outleveling the rest, hitting level cap, and then joining other guilds because we did not have enough Rank 40's on at a given time to go do dungeons. I know, dungeons. In a RvR game. Big pet peeve, long story. This happened more than a few times, it became a self-fulfilling spiral of events. We somehow never achieved a critical mass of enough 40s to enable us to begin endgame. Some stalwarts continued to play, and coordinate with our allied guilds, pugging or playing with guildies as the situation arose. Also, REM started having the same pop issues we had on Ulthuan, and many players started new alts over at Dark Crag.

During this time, my Order guild has steadily grown through it all, even though we also had to transfer from our original home on Averheim. Now on the Badlands server, we are doing well. We aren't huge, but we have a much larger percentage of active players in all level ranges, including at Rank 40. We also have a very active core group of officers that the rest of guild rallies around. My first 40 is on there, Stahlrek the Ironbreaker, but it looks like he will be semi-retired once the Slayer goes live.

So for now, it looks like my destro characters will all be on indefinite hold until we get a destination server finalized. Sigh. The Bitter Rivals event can't start soon enough.