OOC: Being Out of Sync

I am in sort of an unusual situation. I don’t know anyone in real life who plays WoW. I don’t have any friends that play the game with me. My very first play was sparked by some casual acquaintances, but it was just doing a trial period together for free. I am the only one that still plays.

Because of this, I have no support system in the game, and no one that has taught me how things work. I am still learning tricks and tips after a year of playing that I didn’t even know existed. In order to get that same community and to figure out how the game worked and how to get better at it, I started reading blogs. I now read a bunch of WoW blogs, and it’s interesting to see the zeitgeist there.

Lately, I’ve been noticing a lot of posts about enthusiasm and whether people still have enthusiasm and it really hits me how out of sync I am with the population that’s been playing for years. I’ve only been playing for a year, and I’ve been taking it slow because I like to try different things and play different characters and explore all that there is to see. I have no characters at level cap, but multiple alts at varying levels, with my highest being 60, and most being in their 20s, and little Laila here the lowest, having not yet reached 10.

I still have as much enthusiasm for the game as any player that first made their way through the levels had in their first year or two of playing. There is still tons of stuff I haven’t gotten to do yet and tons of options for all of my alts to try. It makes me sad sometimes to read these posts from longtime players because it makes me feel like I caught on too late. Like my feelings will never match up with the feelings of the majority of people playing, nor my experiences.

I won’t ever have that experience that earlier adopters had of discovering everything together with other people, or of having the chance to be the first to do something in the game. Everything I ever do, someone else will have been there, done that.

How much does that bother me? Well, not much. As I said, I don’t often play with other people, although I enjoy the social aspects of the game. I’m happy to explore it all on my own and have the sense of discovery for myself, even if it’s old hat to someone else. So I’ll probably be oohing and aahing over Northrend when everyone else is raiding through whatever the next expansion is. Oh well, in a lot of ways I can consider myself lucky because I still have a long way to go before I lose that enthusiasm.

OOC: How old are your characters?

On one of their recent breakfast topics, WoW.com asks “how old are your characters?” The question of how old a non-human character is in this setting is actually a little bit tricky. It’s very hard to find specific information on the timeline of certain events, with a lot of the major lore events in Azeroth being confined to certain years that happened in the very recent past and a lot of the exact timing of events, especially relative to each other, difficult to work out.

Add onto that a fuzziness about exact lifespans of different races and it gets difficult to quantify. The best way to clarify is to just give an equivalent to human years and make sure that you say it’s an equivalent so that you don’t get griefed by someone saying “that’s just a baby!”

Also, don’t feel that every elf has to be hundreds of years old. People will grief someone who says their elf is only 16 or 20, or whatnot. But the starting areas are relatively safe and sheltered. It’s conceivable that a very young elf would be in the starting area just beginning his or her training. It could be an interesting character/story idea to start a very young elf and imagine that, for example, ten years go by with each level. Of course that is hard to reconcile with the timing of the WoW story, so one would have to be very creative to do it convincingly.

Generally, when trying to work out the ages of my characters, I use the various timelines collected by WoWWiki to determine the age of my characters based on their relation to certain events in history. Likewise, a chart with the lifespans of different races can be found HERE. Already I can see a problem with Laila’s age. I didn’t consult with any source before starting her, since … well, she’s human. But the story begins with her reaching adulthood at 18, when the chart indicates adulthood is reached at 15 in human society. An easy fix, I think.

Not all of my characters have set ages, but for the ones that I have thought about their stories, they are as follows:

- Laila: Eighteen, as stated, although now I am considering revising down to 16.

- Seswatha: My dwarf paladin is an old soldier, around 175 years old. In my head, he started out life as a plain ol’ warrior and only recently became a paladin in his twilight years when he experienced an awakening of faith and dedicated himself to the light as a grizzled old veteran.

- Cecilie: My human warlock is probably at this point around 28 years old. She is no longer young, but she has not yet reached middle age. At one time she was using fel energies to enhance her appearance and make herself look younger, but she has given that up and now appears as her true age, although she still enhances her appearance, as her true coloring is mousy and dull, and she maintains jet black hair to make herself appear more striking.

- Istriya: My undead warrior I imagine to have been in her late 40s when she died. She was in life a country gentlewoman who has a wife, mother, and estate manager. She awoke to undeath with only a vague and fuzzy memory of who she used to be and a newfound strength and fury, leading her to reinvent herself as a fearsome warrior, barely recognizable as the lady she used to be.

- Amoris: My night elf hunter is about 300 years old, or just on the cusp of adulthood for a night elf. Her family has lived in Ashenvale for thousands of years. Her parents died at the hands of Grom Hellscream and his orcs and she was sent away at that time to complete her training elsewhere. She is only now returning to take her mothers place with the Sentinels there.

- Istayla: Given the immortality of Draenei, I cannot say how old Istayla is. She was born on Draenor so she is probably less than 20,000 years old. She had not yet begun training of any kind when she fled Draenor so she is probably even much younger than that, but I can’t find enough information to determine how old she might be.

-Lileda and Eleda: These are a pair of twins, one a blood elf hunter, the other a blood elf death knight. They are about 75 years old, although Eleda is now dead and will not truly age beyond this, except chronologically. Lileda was a solitary hunter by profession, living in the woods, helping to keep the animal population in check and Eleda one of the Farstriders who fell defending Quel’Thalas from the Scourge. Unbeknownst to her family, she was raised as a death knight. Lileda joined the Farstriders after her sister’s death and continues her legacy.

OOC: Belated (or Early) Friday Five – Time is on Our Side

Last Friday, Too Many Annas posted her Friday Five, with some prompts for people to answer about their characters. Since this blogging exercise is all about exploring my character from start until the bitter end, whenever that may be, these separate exercises exploring my character are not only valuable, but fun as well. So I am going to attempt to answer these prompts from my character’s perspective, albeit a little bit late.

• Is your character usually early, on time, or late?  What does he or she expect from other people with regards to time?

I would say that Laila really isn’t a stickler for time. She’s not habitually late, but doesn’t pay attention enough to always arrive early. I would say she’s generally on time, with the possibility to be a few minutes late or early, as she doesn’t particularly try for punctuality.

She also has no expectations from others with regard to time, except that you not stand her up or keep her waiting for an amount of time that becomes rude. She probably won’t even notice if someone is five or ten minutes late, but if you keep her sitting around for 30 minutes or more, except some stormclouds when you finally do show up.

• Is your character a morning sparrow or a night owl?  Is this their nature, or have they trained themselves to it?

Laila is neither a morning person or a nocturnal person, although by training she has become accustomed to waking up early and going to bed early. She grew up in an abbey, so she had to keep the schedule of inhabitants. Left to her own devices, she would probably wake up naturally around 8:30 or 9:00 and stay up a little past the normal bedtime. Perhaps around 11:00 or midnight.

• Does your character carry a time-keeping device? (watch, pocket watch, chronometer, gnomish buzzbox with digital clock peripheral)

No, she’s never heard of any such thing and would be astounded if she were to see one. But she’s not overly concerned with time, so she probably would get really excited about it, ask a lot of questions, and then quickly lose interest.

• How does your character deal with the Bronze Dragonflight – does he or she take them seriously?  take the Caverns of Time seriously?

She has not yet encountered the Bronze Dragonflight, and there’s no telling how she will react if she ever does. If she were to stumble upon it today, she would probably be willing to listen, and once shown the past, she would probably take it seriously.

• What does your character eat for breakfast on a “normal morning”? (whenever that “morning” happens to take place)

Something light. At the moment she is living in an inn and her keep is being paid by the Stormwind Army, so she eats whatever breakfast that entitles her to. I imagine bread, cheese, and some kind of meat most days.

OOC: How I came to WoW

I thought in between the story I would add a few OOC posts about observations, etc. in the game. I know there are zillions of WoW blogs out there by people who have been playing forever, know more than me and are much higher level than I, but perhaps my n00bness will give me a fresh perspective.

Might as well begin at the beginning with how I started playing. I’m not a “gamer,” although I have played video and computer games since I was a kid and my dad brought home a Magnavox Odyssey (oh, did I mention I am old?), I have always been a relatively casual gamer. When I was younger, I mostly played when my brother needed someone to play against. As an adult I play games for fun, but it takes me ages to finish a game, if I ever finish it at all.

I heard about Everquest and MMORPGS sort of vaguely, but never really felt like playing them. I’m not the greatest at chatting up people I don’t know, even in an online situation and the whole thing just seemed outside my area of interest.  So up until last year I blissfully ignored these games. My ex-boyfriend has played Warcraft but I hadn’t been interested in it, and a friend showed me Warcraft III and it looked much better, but I’ve never been into strategy games, so I basically said “neat” and moved on.

When WoW came out, I basically just thought it would be more of the same. Then last year, an online friend talked myself and some other friends into signing up for trial accounts just to try it out and to play with him a little. It makes me laugh to remember signing up for my first account.

My other friends were signing up to be humans, but humans couldn’t be hunters, which is what I wanted to do. I wanted that pet, and I didn’t realize that you would have to wait for 10 levels to get it. So I decided to be a night elf. I had no idea how far away it would put me from my human friends. I was so embarassed when I signed on ready to play and my experienced friend had me pull up the map and showed me where Teldrassil was in relation to where the humans were. Whoopsie!

I also was mad to find out about the pet, because I thought there was no way I would play long enough to get to such a high level as ten!

The other funny thing about that first character was that I had heard about PvP and I was on a PvP server at the time, so I went around in fear that someone was going to come around and gank me, not knowing I was safe in the starting area.

After playing with my friends, I ended up playing a little more on my own, but I thought, after a few days of playing that I would probably not play more. I found that it got repetitive fast and I was really sick of the scenery. I had gone over to a PvE server and leveled a hunter up to ten and run around with her first pet, a nightsabre named “Muffin,” for a while and I thought that was enough for me.

And then something happened. I suddenly wanted to come back. I had thought before playing, that it would be a game you’d get sucked into and have to spend hours a day playing and have no life. But I found it could easily be the opposite. Because of the goal oriented play style of completing quests and both short and long-term goals, I found you could play quite casually and still feel like you accomplished something. By the time I had gotten off the island and seen some sights, I had started to feel like part of the game permanently. I had moved to Auberdine, and something about it felt like “home” to me. I experienced my first holiday event, the Midsummer Festival, which excited me with the fact that special events could happen. And in Stranglethorn Vale I finally felt my character take on a sort of life of her own, and that’s really when I fell in love with the game.

Now my main character is level 60, still running around with her ghost sabre, only her second tamed pet, and her last. I’ve got a bunch of alts and I’ve joined an RP server to try that out as well. This game has definitely been a fun discovery and I’m happy to find it can keep me entertained without actually taking away my life, as is the stereotype.