Well, I'm back. You've all probably forgotten me. I'm your friendly neighborhood Matrix Online Newbie.

I've been so very amazingly broke lately - I wasn't able to afford the account upkeep. Heck I wasn't able to afford an account at all. Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now because my account is restored and all is well.

SO! I've actually been back in the game for about four days now but since I've been pouring every possible spare moment into playing, I've been negligent in getting around to making a blog entry. Sorry!

I've learned a lot in these last few days. For starters, since I now actually own an MXO game box, I've been reading the manual. This is a good idea. See, Sega recently put on an event called, "Friends and Family". That's how I was playing for the first couple of weeks. I tell you this just because I didn't want to give you the impression that I was doing anything illegal (God forbid)!

Anyway, the "Friends and Family" program was a good idea. Sorta. I guess a lot of people played, and no doubt got hooked as I did; but it was also such a very strange way to get started in such a unique and complicated game. Hundreds (presumably, or dozens, or thousands, whatever) of us poor suckers spent two weeks running around the Matrix without the benefit of a manual, trying to make sense of this weird new world!

It is rather a complicated game. And the manual, well, it's quite enlightening, which brings me back to my point. What was it? Oh yeah. I learned a lot from the manual. A lot.

Skills. Erm, guess what? The Matrix Online has these things called skills! I mean, it's not that I didn't know that, just that I didn't realize that I could use them. I thought I was stuck with what I was born with until level 10. I dunno why I thought that, exactly, but I did.

To be fair to myself, there's very little help for newbies when it comes to skill management (outside of the glorious manual), and it's really a very different and arcane system. Skills are not bestowed on the deserving. You have to actually find and purchase them from other players or the occasional vendor, another system (vendors, I mean) that is original and profoundly non-standard.

Anyway, I'm not complaining, only trying to paint a picture of how strange and difficult it was for me, getting started in a world that is remarkably and in many areas, surprisingly unlike any other MMOG I've played, and I've played a lot of MMOGs.