AIE Meetup

For all the MMORPG gamers, WoW peeps and AIE guildies on ER, you can skip down. For everyone else, here are some definitions to help you through this post:

AIE: Alea Iacta Est, "The Die Has Been Cast" guild on ER
Earthen Ring: An RP Server in WoW
MMORPG: Multi-media, online, role-playing game
RP: Role play
WoW: World of Warcraft


So, the family has been playing this online game WoW for almost five years. Clark's coworkers pulled him onto the bandwagon shortly after the game was launched and, as he did with DnD, he corrupted the rest of the family! Being the tech geeks that we are, we started listening to podcasts to help us in the game and stumbled across The Instance podcast, which led us to the Earthen Ring server and AIE, a humongous fun guild. Now is that humongous and fun or humongously fun? Both! The guild is large--over 4000 members, maybe 5000 now, I'm not sure--and there is always lots of conversation in guild chat--aka the green wall, because the default font for guild chat is green--and fun events happen all the time.

Admittedly, Clark and I have not been active lately in either the guild or in WoW. When I was in school and otherwise occupied, Clark kept himself busy in WoW and AIE with NORG--Night Owl Raid Group. When I joined Twitter last year, I chose to follow mainly AIE guildies and have had great Twitter fun with them. So now that we are getting back into the game, it was great to have the opportunity to meet some of the people face-to-face at an AIE guild meetup at the Rainforest Cafe at Opry Mills. I had so much fun, which is saying a lot for this extreme introvert! Ryann went with us and everyone was so welcoming she had a wonderful time as well. Ray's ambition is to go to college for animation and work on video games, so I've been telling her that WoW is definitely something she needs to play and get involved with. Now how many mothers you know tell their teenagers they need to play *MORE* video games? When we got home from the meet-up Ryann logged into WoW, created an Undead Priest for herself and leveled the toon up to level seven in a couple of hours. As for me, my own toon--a Tauren druid--gained another level on my slow crawl to the cap, which is 80...for now. Blizzard announced a new cap of 85 in the upcoming Catyaclysm expansion at this weekend's Blizzcon. Hey, Blizz! Quit it! I'm still trying to get to the original cap level of 60!!



¡Hasta pronto, mis amigos!

~N