card games by a mage's candlelight - gen returns to hearthstone

honestly was considering penning this under the "gen's thoughts" title, but this falls under more freeform musing than rambling about my opinions and thoughts on things. i don't know why i need to stick nearly everything under specific categories; it's not like this site even follows a specific trend or theme to the things i write about. :y

at the start of the month, i've gotten myself back into playing Hearthstone, a digital collectible card game spinoff of the Warcraft series. which is also free for windows/mac and iphones and tablets if you wanna try it out. the microtransaction/free-to-play stuff is pretty fair, too. buy packs and adventure parts with either money or earned ingame gold which is fairly easy to get.

i initially got into Hearthstone around April or March of 2014 when the game was released to the public. played it for a while, got a few card packs out of it, and got a nifty pandaren-themed card back from ranked play. while i did enjoy it, i soon retired from HS for greener pastures, which naturally meant i missed out on a lot of cool card backs from the following months up to now. ah well. such is how life goes, i guess.

wasn't to say i wasn't interested in coming back to the game at some point in the future. my younger brother still plays Hearthstone as of this writing, and of course i had a ton of fun just watching him blow opponents to dust with cheeky tactics. just didn't have the proper incentive to actually play the game again myself. which, knowing me, that incentive most likely involved either more variety to cards, more cosmetic stuff, more content, or tauren. preferably tauren.

'course, we got new card set expansions and adventures and new modes, and i even followed the official Hearthstone twitter, but i wasn't coaxed into coming back until my brother let me know about the latest shaman-themed card back for the current ranked season.

as someone who played shaman in both Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, that was what got me back into the game. got myself to rank 20 now so i'm guaranteed to get the card back after this month, but now i've found myself enjoying the game even more; not solely because of the new cards and content (tavern brawl is fun as hell, i should mention!), but for more poignant reasons. not really the sappy kind of poignant, just stuff that just kinda draws me into the game in a different aspect.

gen's thoughts (and also recs) - a Legacy in the making

been a bit since i last posted something here. this was going to be a post on my thoughts about this server, but i figured it might as well double as a recommendation post since it's p rad as well.

ah, private servers. quite a bit of a polarizing topic amongst many, especially amongst World of Warcraft players. for some people, it's a way to experience past versions of Azeroth. for others, it's a way to experience the joys of questing, player-vs-player combat, and raiding without having to pay a subscription fee. and sometimes there's others who think private servers are gimmicky buggy distortions of blizzard's milestone MMO that don't deliver a legitimate experience like retail.

whatever your opinion, there's no denying that WoW private servers are interesting in concept as well as development. while a lot of servers mostly seem to lean towards PvP and raiding with custom content, some other servers seek to emulate older versions of WoW without any fancy bells or whistles. some other ambitious people heavily modify Azeroth's terrain and add new races and quests, creating an entirely new experience that sets it apart from the crowd.

and oh boy, is Legacy quite the experience in those parts and more.

as someone who's been a WoW player since the Burning Crusade era and a roleplayer from the days of when MSN Messenger was still a thing, roleplaying in World of Warcraft is still a learning experience for me. i'm savvy with most of the lore, but making and roleplaying a character in the game has been a bit awkward for me, especially with how things in retail are handled as far as ingame events go which makes roleplay events a bit tricky despite the inclusion of roleplay servers.

another factor is that zones in the world have a certain level range, so a lv10 player might have quite a way to go before venturing to the lv60-70 Outland area. certain areas of the world would be more populated than others, and from my observations, outside of ingame guilds there didn't seem to be a cohesive forum to keep up to date on events that would happen, though considering there's a site for retail's Wyrmrest Accord server, i guess it's my fault for not poking around long enough for it. game mechanics and progression also put a hamper on things as far as roleplay is concerned.

Legacy is one of the few WoW private servers exclusively dedicated to roleplaying in the Warcraft setting. in 2009, the project was initially conceived under the name of Epilogue by a dude named S, who was upset at "the almost non-existent role playing support from Blizzard". what started as a small community eventually boomed in popularity, but real-life commitments and other pressures would eventually spell the end of the server. luckily, popular demand soon revived the project, now under the name of Prologue. Legacy eventually came to be after the loss of Prologue's game and forum data, as well as a meeting with S.

while i could go on with the history of the server, i still don't know much considering i've only recently heard of this server, and i've only been a part of the Legacy community for around two weeks as of the time of this writing.

so from the perspective of a Warcraft fan, longtime RPer, gamedev lover, and Legacy newbie, what makes Legacy so great for its concept, and what sort of experience can someone expect?