A Lazy Search
When I decided to really dump my time into March of War, I decided that I would have to sample all of the factions to see which set of units, playstyle, and community each faction possessed. However, you start with only enough slots for 2 or 3 characters. You could obtain more by either buying them, or finishing the “Tech Tree” of a faction. You did this by winning battles and using the Research Points (RP) rewarded to you to unlock more units and abilities for your army. Once you had researched everything in a faction’s tech tree, you got another slot for an additional character (plus some nukes in a crate). Fortunately, I had completed this during my time in the Latin Junta, and so had another slot.
Thus began my search for the right faction to join. First, I went north to the United Republic. The name Lazy_Paladin was the name of my LJ character and so didn’t carry over to any other characters. During my time spent in the chats, I saw that a number of players would have themes for all of their alternate characters (or “Alts”). Some of these themes would be adding a number, or ending each name with the same word, like my friend Kenjii. He had many alts: EmperorKenjii, GeneralKenjii, ComradeKenjii etc. I decided that incorporating Paladin would be too long due to the limited amount of characters you can use in your name, so I decided to continue using the “Lazy_” prefix. So now I had half of a name, but that wasn’t good enough. Another alias that I had used on my PS3 for my Battlefield days was “BIO_Heathen” and I decided to incorporate that into this new game. So I created my UR character named “Lazy_Heathen” and the tradition was born. I knew that every character I made in the future would have to be Lazy. And I was ok with that since I’m a little lazy in real life. I also wanted to be unique and make a name for myself. Kenjii eventually started calling me “His Laziness” and many players simply called me “Lazy” so I guess it worked. I still use His_laziness for some of my aliases today. That should give you some idea of how much this game affected my life.
I really liked the UR. The HC was active and gave good orders, and the rest of the players were helpful. But the best thing about the UR was the units. I loved the units. It probably had something to do with the fact that I am an American and that I have always loved the World War 2 era, and so was probably biased towards them, but I loved everything about them. I loved the way they looked, their abilities, the faction’s playstyle, the color of your name in the chatrooms, everything. It was kind of amusing to me however, that most of the UR’s attention was focused on the LJ and that I rose through the ranks fighting against my old faction for their enemies. But it didn’t matter. The lines would go back and forth so often, and hardly any players ever played only one single faction. Rather, they would choose one faction to devote most of their time to. Unless you were the FL, a senior HC member, or very active politically, no one really thought twice if you fought on both sides of a war.
In fact, when my time in MoW was close to being over, I was acting like a mercenary. I would offer my grinding services (repeatedly playing against the AI on a certain front, often for hours at a time) to players that I knew. Wiked and Akridd took special advantage of this, and I spent a lot of time in the LJ and AW helping them fight their wars. Wiked was the AW FL and holds the record for the longest time as FL I believe. Akridd was an SE HC member who also held the position of LJ FL towards the end of the game. I didn’t agree with that, but he is my friend, and I was nostalgic towards the LJ, so I helped him out sometimes.
At this point in my MoW experience, I did not pay much attention to the global theater. I focused on grinding out victories as ordered by my HC and FL, but for the life of me I can’t remember hardly any names, specific wars, conspiracies, or policies of my early days of playing. I suppose I was very timid and overwhelmed with everything going on. I loved being a grunt, essentially, and didn’t bother myself with anything above my pay-grade. That would eventually change, but for the time being I contented myself with wiping out enemy forces.
I was having a great time in the UR, and I could see myself giving my time to the faction and becoming a dedicated and loyal member, more than just a grunt. But down inside of me a little voice kept telling me to move on and keep looking. So I did. I believe that the next faction I checked out was the EA. I had come across EA players often, both in battles and the chats. I knew that they were one of the most powerful factions, and so decided to give them a shot. Over time, I would create a few EA characters, but the first one was Lazy_Bismarck.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that the EA wasn’t for me. Yeah they had powerful units, and a very organized player command structure, but it didn’t click for me. There was something about it that just turned me away. I’m convinced that I knew that the EA wasn’t where I was supposed to be, but since I had spent so little time in the EA, I hadn’t finished their tech tree and I was out of new slots. So I deleted Lazy_Bismarck and headed over to the Soviet Union. It would be very pretentious and self-centered, not to mention very cliché, to say that this is when the legend was born, so I won’t. But I never left the SU in search of a better place to play MoW. When I arrived in the SU, it took almost no time at all for me to name myself. It was a no-brainer to me. It had to be done. I became “Lazy_Comrade.”
Thanks for reading!
Link to the Prologue that explains a lot of the acronyms: https://steemit.com/story/@lazy-writer/a-march-of-war-lazycomrade-prologue
Pic Sources:
http://swain1234.deviantart.com/favourites/59444498/March-of-War
http://www.alphabetagamer.com/march-of-war-steam-early-access/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/234310