Jee Dubya Wun

So a few days back someone brought the Hall of Monuments Rewards to my attention, so being as I have tons of free time till next weekend I managed to do the impossible and get back into Guild Wars 1.  Kind of.

The first thing that struck me booting up GW again was the name scheme, which brings back a lot of memories.  At the time, when my good friend Nick, aka Spinky IV or Spinaci [Olive Garden] (OG REPRESENT), talked me into trying Guild Wars I had only played two other MMOs up to that point--FFXI and LotRO.

I'd spent my 2 year career in Final Fantasy XI as a bearded male hume called Kurohyou, which was my best attempt at translating "Pantera" to Japanese--I realized much later that "kuro" is actually black, but just "Hyou" would have been kinda lame anyways.  Since all my GW characters all shared the surname Pantera, I ended up naming my Elementalist Nero for my old FFXI character.

During the Lord of the Rings Online beta I'd used the name Pantera, but shortly after release I was forced to change the name (the first twist of the dagger that wrecked my interest in that game).  In my flustered state the only name I could come up with was the alias one of the creators of EliteMUD (which I'd spent a few years of my youth playing), Kurrelgyre.  I ended up giving this name to my Warrior in Guild Wars.  In retrospect this seems like a weird decision, or at least one I wouldn't have made now; since I'd used the name Kurrelgyre begrudgingly it's odd that I'd give it to my "main"--I was a WAR main in FFXI and it became my most played character in GW (and my first character in WoW, incidentally, though in every case they're much different from Warrior in FFXI).

Many of my other characters' names were references to my MMO past as well.  Tek, Valencia, and Gravios were names of my mule alts in FFXI (Gravios was a further reference to a dragon in Monster Hunter).  Desyrel was an alias I used in LotRO, and was the first seed of what would eventually grow to be my current general MMO naming scheme.  Coming up on a lack of ideas, I named two after myself and my grandfather, then randomly went with Miang for one, likely with Xenogears in mind (which is interesting providence considering I've been replaying through Xenogears on emulator to pass time lately as well).  Named one for Fargo, where I'd been living most of my life up until a year ago.

I nearly forgot how unilaterally awesome Guild Wars was/is though.  It's an excellent prototype for what a game with horizontal scaling would look like.  Even if I didn't love GW's PvP (which I do), there's plenty of PvE content on various levels that manages to be both challenging and rewarding, even it's as basic as pimping out a horde of Heroes.

Anyways, I'm shooting for 30/50 even though it's probably a little impractical.  I managed to get 7+/50 pretty quick just on HoM statues I basically already had (which was enough to get the legacy armor pieces), but the item rewards end at 30 so I'm trying to get as far as I realistically can in a week.  A lot of the statues are extremely difficult to get on short notice, so I'm aiming for as much of the low hanging fruit ones as I already have progress towards.