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WRUP: Newbie woes edition

Bree Royce
- Massively's Editor-in-Chief
Updated ·7 min read

Being the newbie editor at Massively is tough. I'm stuck in cloth armor. All I've got is a rusty sword. I'm supposed to slay the dragon eventually, but my skillbar is looking pretty weak. And I just know everyone is laughing at me in general chat.

Fortunately, we're only newbies at anything once. This week in WRUP, the Massively staff admit that yes, we were newbies once, too, in answering commenter Blah?'s question: "What was your first MMO?" As usual, we also discuss our more immediate gaming plans, now that those wide-eyed days are far behind us.

Join us after the break to see what the Massively team is plotting for the weekend!


  • Beau Hindman (@spouseaggro): I'll be playing with Crowns of Power some more, some Vanguard and Mabinogi. Of course I'll be doing my normal exploration of other exotic worlds for Rise and Shiny. My first MMO was Ultima, of course.

  • Brendan Drain (@nyphur): For those who haven't been keeping up with the latest events in EVE Online, CCP have brought back live events and there's one happening right now! Sansha's Nation have begun invading high security space via wormholes and abducting citizens of the four empires from their populated planets. Join the SynePublic channel in-game to get involved in the capsuleer resistance movement or wait for the EVE Evolved column this Sunday where I'll give a breakdown of the events so far. With Tyrannis coming out soon, I'm also playing the market a little. Blah's bonus question: Given that I'm a complete EVE nut, you'd probably think my first MMO was EVE Online. Before that, however, I played Runescape back in the days when there were less than a dozen servers and the game still used some awful hand-drawn 2D sprites. I watched that game grow and adapt to keep up with player expectations, constantly increasing in popularity. I think having Runescape as my first MMO and EVE as my second has given me something of a unique perspective on the rest of the genre.

  • Brianna Royce: My mini-game of the weekend will be learning Massively from top to bottom (as Shawn put it, leveling up my editor class!) But I hope to squeeze in some time with my guild in LotRO, too -- our crew, including my tubby little Hobbit minstrel, is trekking toward Lothlorien. And maybe, just maybe, I can finally finish Mass Effect 2 so my mates will stop heckling me. As for my first MMO: it was the first -- UO, of course -- in which I spent my newbie days taming bunnies and picking up garbage along the road. What?

  • Edward Marshall: I'll be constructing my 5th or 6th dune buggy in Fallen Earth and inching my way to the level cap on my main and alts. Not to sound cliche, but my first MMO was Ultima Online.

  • Eliot Lefebvre: This week has not been kind to me in terms of gaming time, and the weekend doesn't look super-kind either. However, with the time I do have I'm hoping to take part in the Adventurer Appreciation Campaign over in FFXI, and continue leveling my spiders in CoH. If I'm very lucky, I might have the time to indulge myself with a bit of personal writing somewhere in there. My first MMO, as I know I've mentioned before, was Final Fantasy XI. I loved the immersion and hated the fact that I was shackled to a group in order to do anything even remotely cool. I think that's informed far too much of my playstyle.

  • Jef Reahard: Age of Conan for me. Godslayer has a ton of new stuff to see and do, and frankly I was already having fun with the original game beforehand. Aion will get a couple of hours, maybe less since there's no double XP, and I've also re-upped my old Star Wars Galaxies accounts for nostalgia's sake. It's too bad they haven't taken a page out of EQ2's Passport book, as the pending launches of EVE's Tyrannis and Red Dead Redemption next week will mean that I log in long enough to cackle maniacally over my krayt dragon's hoard, take the YT-2400 for a quick spin, and log off.

  • Justin Olivetti (@sypster): I've got a lot on deck for this weekend -- getting my burglar up to 40 in LotRO, trying out Ultima Online for the very first time in my life, and resubbing to Star Trek Online (I miss the ship combat, okay? Plus, Cryptic is THE BEST DEVELOPER IN THE WORLD). My first MMO was, oddly enough, Anarchy Online on launch day. It's a wonder I ever tried another MMO past that.

  • Krystalle Voecks (@Krystalle): This weekend is stuffed full of tabletop, rehearsals and stomping around in Age of Conan when I get a chance. I got my MMO start in the early days of EverQuest. While I will always love EQ, it has become the ex-boyfriend of MMOs to me. Every so often I'll see it again, remember how much I loved it, and decide to give it another chance. In the end, I wind up a little wiser, with little less cash, and wishing one really could recapture that initial romance of the old days.

  • Patrick Mackey (@mackeypb): I finally got my hands on a copy of Assassin's Creed 2, so I'll be probably messing around with that. I'm also way behind on hitting 40 on my latest alt, but playing CO has been pretty depressing lately. I might even play GW some with the MVOP people. Who knows. As for the bonus question, my first MMO experience was playing a wizard in EQ. Probably one of the most boring endgame jobs ever; wait until the raid leader calls nuke, spam the highest dps nuke you have (or mana burn, once they made AA points) and pray the boss dies before you pull aggro off the tank. Fun times.

  • Ryan Greene (@thatgaynerd): I'll be grinding levels in that most exciting of MMOs: World of Finding a Jobcraft. The original Everquest was my very first MMO. Ruins of Kunark was shiny and new when I was headed off to undergrad, and my best friend and I thought this dang-fangled online gaming would be a good way to stay in touch. I still miss grinding goblins in High Keep for hours and days on end.

  • Shawn Schuster (@SSchuster): I'll be spending some time leveling in Aion and exploring the wonderful new achievement system in Fallen Earth. On top of that, Fable II and Final Fantasy XIII will polish out the weekend.

  • Seraphina Brennan (@sera_brennan): This weekend it's all about one thing -- Call of Cthulhu. My gaming group is starting up a one-shot set of missions, and I have been craving playing that game for a while now. It will be great to jump back into the investigation mode! Past that, I think I might start back up with Age of Conan. Rise of the Godslayer intrigues me, and I have a few friends who have been interested in trying it out. Perhaps we'll all jump in as a team and see how we fair in the lands of Hyboria! Blah's Bonus Question Answer: Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds was my first MMO. It was absolutely thrilling to play, as it was my first introduction to games with huge amounts of players. The game is still running today, as a matter of fact.

Alright commenters, now it's on you: which worlds will you wander this weekend? And don't forget to include a super special bonus question for the Massively team. If we like your question, we might just answer it in next week's WRUP! And if we don't like it, we might answer it anyway -- we're long-winded like that.