The Oceanic Community

So you know the little discussion that we had been having about finding people who play like us, on the same timezone?

I have been revisiting it a little in my search for an Aion guild, aka Legion.

Part of my problem is that I don't want to play too hardcore. So anything that goes, "Rarrr rarrr, we are l33t end-game raiders, or b4d4ss PVPers" is out of the question.

So is anything with bad spelling in their guild recruitment notices, since anyone who can't be arsed to spellcheck their recruitment posts is not likely to have enough maturity to run a guild either, especially not with a new game's onrush of completely different folk.

Amusingly, the above criteria takes out 80% of the proud SG/MY community, who tend towards SMS speak or Singlish or some odd blend of hokkien-mandarin-malay sekrit language code.

(I can barely understand half of the chat from P's WoW guild that I was invited into as a casual member. The other half is standard rampant male ego, par for the MMO course, so that's not too bad. But I do like the insider's look at a guild chat that considers itself pretty l33t in raiding, with jargon-filled requirements as to the spec of the raider, and prior raid experiences, etc.

It reminds me a bit of old RoD experiences, except the more I read about WoW raid acceptance requirements, the more I can't be arsed to jump through hoops in order to learn how to jump through more hoops and line dance.)

Since delving into WoW raiding was looking more and more distant a possibility, feeling out an Aion social community became a little more important.

Some Google-fu revealed some most interesting forum posts about Oceanic guilds on a self-selected unofficial Aion server.

Good lord. I recognise most of the names. A ton of them are all from Age of Conan and Warhammer Online.

Radical Dreamers. Circle of Kakis. Mist Wolves. Doomborgen Morgen. The Kelly Gang. Atrum Imperator. The Older Gamers. Southern Cross. TRF. Jeez.

Talk about migratory Aussies. (And Asians.)

Even my old AoC/WAR guild is there on the list. (Blood Council). Except I've kinda lost touch with them because their event timing never worked for me (I'm still at work at 8pm GMT+10) and they're all Achiever/Killer personalities on a Bartle scale, who use ventrilo a lot and barely pay attention to typed text. Makes it hard to find stuff in common.

In a sense, this is kind of depressing. Because it means that the Oceanic community is kind of small, and knows each other, and is highly migratory to boot so they may just pack up and leave to the next big thing if the game sucks too much. If my personality doesn't fit into any of them, I'm kinda screwed for people in the same timezone as me.

Then again, I haven't tried them all, have I?

So this seemed like a good time to find a new guild. Enter new name change. :) Thank goodness for Internet anonymity.

Try as I might to find a suitable GMT+8 guild, they all seem not quite it. It's a little infuriating. A lot of SG guilds are humongous organisations, with perhaps a core group and a bunch of satellite members... or they are an offshoot of this humongous online organisation, with a new guild leader, who may or may not work out successfully.

Not to mention, they're mostly all going purty Elyos, with the handsome anime-style boys and the near-naked hot chicks.

Dammit. I want to play a demon with claws and a mane and fiery eyes who thinks he's been deeply wronged, not some pansy angel who is an arrogant bastard to boot.

Sifting out the Asmodian side left me with rapidly evaporating choices. It ended up boiling down to one, that I applied for, and got accepted into, but it looks like a very small 10 person affair, if that. Most are also GMT+10. That's really going to screw up my event attendance chances if they don't take my timetabling into account.

We'll see.

I guess there's always another guild. And another game.

If Aion doesn't work out, or the next big cool game with lots of PvP turns up... I have a feeling I'm going to see many of the same big Oceanic names.

Could be that there just aren't that many Oceanics in the pond to maintain more than a certain critical mass of social groupings. :/