Trials of a World of Warcraft Player: Entry One

“The One Ring”

It’s been a year since my last addiction. I jumped into World of Warcraft a year after heavily playing Guild Wars (roughly 2005), I left WoW a year later due to boredom with leveling and grinding. There were so many other games I could get into that didn’t involve the time investment into this MMORPG.

Then, in 2007 I returned on the eve of Burning Crusade. Blizzard had me… they put out an expansion and drew me back in even though I never had a character (“toon”) that could leverage the powers of the new content. I had two characters at level forty four but most of my friends left for other adventures once I quit the game. I started over yet again, only now on a PvP server instead of the “too easy” PvE server everyone abandoned. This time I made it to level eighteen with one character and level twenty with another but I left not long after because of time issues and managing my life around other games (and my kids).

Here I stand now, a third attempt at World of Warcraft with little to no expectations but a small goal: be ready for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion due out later this year. If I can reach those goals I’ll have also conquered the Burning Crusade content I’ve never achieved. Not even three hours into gaming I’ve re-rolled another character which my distract from my goal.

Why Roll A New Character? I ask myself this question often and the only good answer is denial: life as a low character is easy and I gather neat new skills faster so I feel more progress is being made, although the inverse is true. I’ve had these same issues with classic paper-dice RPG’s, I love inventing new characters and new roles, the end game content isn’t always my first choice.

I’m back to my PvE way of life, on yet another realm and have paid my USD $50.00 to transfer my oldest two characters to the server, back to my life as a Horde. I’ve abandoned those friends that once abandoned me when they moved to PvP and, now, met up with some other friends who play more casually. I’m not a PvP kinda guy, I just want to occasionally game without the pressure to meet up for weekly raids and practice our “tactics.” I just wanna kill stuff.

World of Warcraft is an addiction, a way of life, it is something that you’ve got to take seriously because you’re paying monthly for the privilege to lose precious hours of your real life to a virtual world. You have to respect it, always keeping it at arms length to avoid being crushed by its outer worldly desires. If you let it consume you, you’ll be a changed person with very few options to get out. World of Warcraft is the “One Ring” and must be taken seriously to avoid danger… you’re always running.

How long will I hold out before I release the game once more? I’m not certain, hopefully until at least February of 2009 so I can fully appreciate the extra content I’ve continued to purchase. But, I’ll get out before I find myself in a dark cave eating fishes while invisioning Azeroth and whispering, “my preciousssss”

0 thoughts on “Trials of a World of Warcraft Player: Entry One”

  1. As a fairly new player to WOW (three months), I’ve learned one important thing. The game is what I want it to be.

    I don’t understand those in a hurry to level up. I don’t want to race from quest to quest like my cloak is on fire. If I decide to spend the day fishing, I don’t consider it a waste.

    The goal for me is to have fun. I already have a job. And in that context, WOW has more to offer than people give it credit for.

  2. In some ways you’re right, in others you’re still new to it 🙂 Once you’ve created a new character a few times you may encounter a situation where you end up doing the same quests again, like deja vu.

    For instance, creating an orc and then a troll will lead you down different paths from level 1 to roughly 7 but then once you hit higher levels you’ll start crossing paths to where, no matter what race you have, you’ll always be doing the same Crossroads quests and such.

    What I’ve tried to do is stick with races that are more separate by space, Tauren vs. Troll vs. Undead vs. Blood Elf, so that you get a slight variation to the quest. Then, you want something completely new you try some Alliance races/classes.

    Everyone ends up on the same quest track by level 25 so once you’ve created five horde characters you realize that you’re doing the same thing five times in a row, that gets tedious and, with that, you tend to use more addons like QuestHelper to give you a bit more clue on what direction to go “just to get this one done with.”

    I just like experimenting with new classes and exploring the possibilities, but the quest situation… in the end, I’ll be doing the same thing I did with my Troll and Tauren.

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Trials of a World of Warcraft Player: Entry FiveTrials of a World of Warcraft Player: Entry Five

“The Grind”

With Wrath of the Lich King arriving last week it only made sense to jump into the new content “Lich King” style. Although we had initially reacted to the beta, playing the final content was much more fun with all of our guild and friends to play along.

It only took a few hours to get my new Death Knight to level-58 beyond the starting area and into the real world of Azeroth. Upon reaching the main city (Ogrammar as we’re horde) I picked up two new professions to make me a bit of dime: mining and skinning. This is where the beauty of the Death Knight fell apart…

A level-58 character has a few options open for exploration with the Burning Crusade content being the most desirable starting point. However, quickly it became apparent that my professions of mining and skinning were useless in Hellfire and other Burning Crusade areas. Why? Professions start with a value of 1. The last expansion requires your professions to be roughly 300 before you can utilize them.

My level-58 Death Knight has no experience in the ways of skinning and mining, what has he been doing all his life? Apparently killing innocent people in small villages throughout the Eastern Plaguelands. My anticipation with leveling my Death Knight died knowing I’d spend the next few days hunting mines and killing animals as if I where a level-10 toon.

There I was, a high level character trolling Crossroads and Thousand Needles hunting for copper and tin and skinning all the low level creatures I could find. Why didn’t Blizzard consider this when they allow you to create a level-55 character on day one? If we don’t go off and grind our way to a profession level of 300 we might as well not even pick professions at all.

I was not alone in these findings, along my path I found several Death Knights with skinning knives and mining tools looking for open opportunities to cut into the earth or the dead animals skins all around them. Sure, we can kill a cat in seconds flat but the “grind” is what we wanted to avoid, this is what characters spend their first twenty levels doing!

After three sessions of mind numbing grinding I’ve managed to reach a skill of 340 in skinning and coming upon 200 in mining. Mining is still too low for high level game content so I must whisk myself away to noobville every so often to catch a few mythril nodes and pray for a gold deposit along the way.

This may not be a bug in the Wrath of Lich King expansion but it sure is an annoying design flaw.

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