Korrode's Kollateral

Through my pre-teen years, most of the gaming i did was on consoles. The SNES occupied many of my waking hours, especially before i really got into the technical side of PC's. Certainly the games i enjoyed most were Squaresoft's RPGs (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, etc.), and since then i've been a pretty solid RPG fan and have played many single player games over the years. Later on i got more into FPS and especially RTS games... Starcraft was a favorite pastime for a good long while...

Then somewhere in in early 2006, my Linux loving friend who was living with us at the time (and still is my housemate to this day), makes me aware of a multi-platform, free MMORPG called Eternal Lands.

Follow up:

Although it would still be a long time before i was running Linux as my primary desktop OS, the fact my anti-Windows housemate was interested in playing, and capable of with his OS, certainly seemed to make it something worth investigating. My brother was interested as well.

And so the 3 of us started playing this free, beta MMORPG game - Eternal Lands (EL).

After a few months, the initially keen interest of my friend and brother died off, but mine did not. Now, 2 years later, I am still playing.
I can probably narrow it down to 3 key things that keep me interested:

1. The community, and the interesting dramas that spring from therein.
2. The Player-VS-Player combat system, and striving to build my character and increase skills with 'PK' supremacy as the goal.
3. The fact that the game is not being developed by a big company, but by a married couple and a handful of volunteers. The players get to have a lot of input and get much insight into the development.

I don't often see big game companies taking a high degree of direct interest in what their players have to say, generally there are teams of researchers and developers who research and develop to come up with a game. In EL, the development process is a lot more open to us as players, and we're often asked for opinions. Although, i don't want to paint too nicer picture of the original creator and main developer of the game; Entropy (Entropy is the alias he uses on the forums, i feel it's appropriate for use in my blog).
Rather than the term 'head developer' or 'game owner', he much prefers "teh G0d", and this is appropriate for how he acts and how he runs the game, not just from an RPG point of view, but in general. His responses to opinions and suggestions are often less than polite and i personally believe he needs to re-consider some of his priorities and the direction he is taking the game... but in some ways, this almost-battle is half the fun.

Anyways, to conclude this introduction...
Really, I've started utilising my Blog for this purpose 2 years late.
Much has happened that i wish i'd put down in writing. Such varied things as a modification to the character building system that changed the PvP combat system forever, to falling for a woman from the USA that i met in-game, and going to the USA to meet her...
...but it's better late than never . I may try and re-cap some past key experiences and events over the next few days.