Post #300: Reflections of First Year in Sword2

As we are nearing the end of the year and the end of GamersFirst as our host for Sword2, I thought I would use this 300th post* to reminisce how I spent my first year in the game.  *I'm pretty amazed at myself for keeping up this blog nearly daily since January 27th with all the real life stuff I've got going on.  I know at times my posts are short and boring...  I'm a crazy blogger who makes it a point to post something when I'm around.

My brother had gotten started on Sword2, I don't know when, I'm guessing when the Sword2 first came out.  I thought it looked interesting, but being someone who had really poor hand-eye coordination with console games, I didn't feel compelled to get started on it.  After some time, he stopped playing (busy with college) and didn't pick it back up again until the summer of 2010.  He was working on a quest in Tetra Ruins, very slowly farming Cabosse.  He shared with me about how things were progressing slowly and if he had some help he could finish the quests faster.  I guess timing is everything.  I was looking for something to do and thought I would try out the game.

I picked out my first three stock characters and decided, of course, I have to have a Scout.  I made it the opposite gender of my brother's Scout.  Next, I picked two stock characters which my brother didn't have, which were Elementalist and Fighter.  It took awhile to pick out names because I wasn't very creative.  Eventually I picked Nadia (Female Scout), Benecio (Male Elementalist), and Flavia (Female Fighter).  This ended up becoming my naming convention.  All my female characters have names ending in "ia", but I couldn't find many male names with "cio", so I just attach it to the end.  (I have three male characters who do not follow this convention.)

I had a difficult time with the game because I didn't know what I was doing and my brother wasn't particularly instructive.  The first few months was a lot of stop and go playing.  He himself hadn't played for long and couldn't speed up leveling me.  Eventually I was able to help him out with the farming of those Cabosse and other quests.  Things didn't pick up for me until autumn that year.

One thing my brother did teach me, was selling Team Arena starters to make Vis (neither of us could sell Circus starters as we weren't at that level).  Back in the day, TA was still at a set time and you could go as many times as you could possibly warp back before the TA statue closed.  Both of us made it a point to be there to sell starters.  Eventually I got fast enough that I could sell up to six starters per night.  That took a lot of luck though, because you had to be on the buyer's side to get paid quickly, otherwise, you had to run to the middle and wait to get paid, which could sometimes eat up two minutes of the ten minute TA statue timer.

It was at TA that I started making friends, so to speak.  Mostly they were people who contacted me for TA starters.  The person who really took the time to talk to me and help me out was a player by the name of Oakshire.  I was standing at the TA Statue, waiting for it to get started.  He had a Male Ele clad in Robe of Superb Daemon.  I messaged him to comment on it, because that was a big deal armor to me (92e was considered pro and even 84e was not bad) and I thought it looked very nice.  We chatted a bit and added each other to Friends List.  The next day he asked me if I wanted to be Secret Guarded (which at the time I didn't know what it meant or what it entailed) on one of his alts.

And so, over the course of several months of SG'ing in the evenings and weekends (we did not do any Vesping), first at Deprimida Valley until I got to Veteran, then Bahamar Wetlands to mid-Vet, and Bahamar Underground Cave (the mobs weren't so harsh that patch) and Frozen Wastes, I got my first three Experts on December 10th, 2010.  Back then when Experts were promoted, it was broaded.  I was so excited to get Experts and see my name show up for the server to see!

After that, we stayed in Frozen Wastes and would squad half a dozen accounts together so we could mob kill and get Memorial Cards quickly in order to spam an Expert to Level 3 to go to Citadel of the Gods and get the Memo Cards there.  I spent a lot of time at SA Caeb (as we called it) and saved up a lot of cards while I leveled Expert Stances.  Enhanced Tactics, Occultism, and Augury were a pain to level!

Those three Experts were leveled naturally to Master without card spamming, taking me about half a year, to the end of May 2011.  After that, I started working on Katia (Female Musketeer, my love of muskies must have started then) and Valencia (Calypso, because I thought she was the coolest UPC).  (You can see Wizards are not my forte, though neither are Fighters!)

It took me nearly a year to get my first Masters, but I couldn't have done it without help from Oakshire (in honor, this year I gave Ramiro a variation of his name) and looking back on it, it was really amazing to have gone through it, all that time and effort.  Now I'm so lazy and spam cards to level characters, because I feel like I'm always in a hurry of some sort; I don't put in the time to make effort and "smell the roses".  I don't know if it makes sense, but even though those days were trying at times, the challenge made it fun.

Here's to wrapping up 2012 and may 2013 bring new challenges!

Cheers!
~Ferragamo

/edit: Someone asked me about my Second Year in Sword2, maybe I'll write about it.