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 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.