Sunday, October 11, 2009

Introduction

I am relatively new to playing on the world of Amia.  Amia is a module created for the game role-playing computer game Neverwinter Nights.  It's a perpetual world.  This means that it is a module that is hosted on a server so you can log into it and play anytime you want.  It is not designed to have a beginning, middle and end of a story like stand-alone games do.  It is designed to be a world that you live in as your character and role-play with all the other players that are also there.

From about the time I started really looking at Amia, re-installed Neverwinter Nights (NWN) on my computer, started playing up to right now starting this blog it has been about three weeks.

An old online friend of mine showed up out of the blue one week.  We hadn't spoken to each other in a long time.  You probably know how online friendships go.  Real life gets in the way and you eventually move apart.  This friend and I used to play NWN frequently.  We even had dreams of creating our own perpetual world for others to play in.  I dabbled in the building tools, but since I don't know coding it was a rather silly thing for me to contemplate.  (He could do some coding, though, and had some decent stuff written up for our little world.)

But this friend, Melf, posted on an old forum we used to frequent.  He said he had found a great server to play NWN on and invited any of us old-timers to join him if we were up for a good game.  It took me a while but I eventually did.  About three weeks ago.

I have enjoyed my time there so far.  Amia is a wonderful world.  It is well-designed and very rich in details from what little I've seen and know so far.

One day while perusing the Amia forum I started reading this thread.  It was talking about how to attract new players but also started to diverge a little bit about how to keep new players.  Being a newcomer to the world I decided to chime in and mention how much I enjoyed it, but also how overwhelming it is.  There is a LOT of content in Amia.  The learning curve is steep.  There is a LOT of information on the forum and it takes a lot to figure out where you want and need to start to help get your feet under you in the game world.

In response to my post, Dev Disco, the main creator/developer of Amia asked if I'd be interested in writing a diary about my beginnings and learning curve on Amia.  So we have this blog.

I'm going to see what I can do to give an idea of the thoughts going through my head as I play and learn things on Amia.  I have no plan for any certain writing style I'm going to use.  I'm going to try to remember what I went through and was thinking over the past three weeks as I got started. I'm going to write about the things I learn going forward.  I'm just going to write what comes to mind.  Good or bad, a legitimate point or a lack of knowledge because I didn't look in the correct place to find it, I'm going to write about what happens to me as I play Amia and what I learn as I research on the forums and in the game.

Hopefully, in the long run, this will be helpful to future new players trying to get their feet under them.  And if I'm really lucky I might hit on something that will be helpful to the developers that can be changed or made more clear for everyone's benefit.

On the Amia forums my name is Tah.  In NWN I log in under Tah of White Fisher.  If you would like to contact me you can email me at my NWN name (without spaces) @gmail.com.  You can also leave comments here.  Ask me questions, point out where I missed information (I'm hopefully not the only one learning something from this blog), let me know if there's an aspect of Amia you think I should look into, learn and then write about.  Or just let me know if you're enjoying or completely hate the blog.

Now let's get started with Amia.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amia is the worst NWN PW out there and falls far from an RP server. Elitist, Rude DM's, and trolls run rampant. Check it out:

http://anti-elitamia.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=3

Notice how the DM's don't address the issue, deny they exist, and then don't reply. My advice: Don't waste your time playing on Amia. There are far better servers out there FRC, Arelith, pretty much anything else.

Anonymous said...

It's rather peculiar that somebody who is searching the internet for places to post a link to (his?) Frustration Central forum is calling other people "troll". Didn't get enough attention yet, I assume.

Anonymous said...

I've tried both FRC and Arelith, and so far in Amia i've had the least trouble to find people to play with.