Lo-Quality WoW

As all things, we’ll start at the beginning. How did I start playing World of Warcraft? It had to do with moving to my current company. At my current workplace, we use Mac laptops. Now considering that I have a UNIX background, the Mac works best for me except in one area, gaming.

Now you’re saying, “It’s your work computer, why are you gaming on it?” Well, when you find yourself 2000+ miles away from home, in a strange city where you spend all day in a classroom and have no desire to go out at night, you have a lot of time on your hands. And since at that time, I didn’t even own a personal laptop, that means my work laptop was with me and some evenings, there just was nothing on television that I really wanted to watch. This left me with limited options for entertaining myself. Even then I probably wouldn’t have gotten into WoW except that my co-worker would play it during lunch. I’d watch him and he would talk about doing “such and such” in game. Eventually, I gave in and picked up a copy of WoW…
And, given my sometimes obsessive personality, found myself spending unwholesome amounts of time playing. But I was having fun, which was important. Not to mention stress relieving. So now there’s my co-worker and myself, playing WoW during lunch, and naturally we begin infecting the office. So far, we’ve gotten 6 other co-workers, 2 spouses, and several other individual friends to either join or move over to our realm server where we’ve formed the mighty “Plush Kitty Toys” guild. Complete with a pink tabard with baby blue highlights! (Because if you’re a big bad Horde, do you want to admit that you got taken out by an Alliance player who’s a “Plush Kitty Toy” running around in a pink tabard?)

Okay, maybe “mighty” is a misnomer. We’re a casual guild in every practical sense. But that has to do with the nature of our makeup more than anything. Most of the other’s are married and/or have kids. At least two of our people are a couple of timezones away in New Mexico. It makes getting together to run Raids or even instances difficult. On the hand, there’s no pressure and complete understanding when someone can’t make it for a run or has to cut out because the kids need feeding or wakes up or whatever else kids do. (As you can tell, I’m quite single.) For most of us, it’s a fun diversion and stress relief. Not to mention the fact that WoW also acts as our company’s emergency help desk system, because if the company’s network is down, you can usually find an engineer online somewhere on WoW…

Anyway, back to my involvement with WoW. I’ve been playing for a couple of years now, have been around for both the launch of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and have at least one of each character class and at least one from each Alliance race. (Sorry, just haven’t gotten around to playing on the Horde side of the fence yet.) Am I an expert? Not really. I don’t understand or research a lot of the mechanics or number crunching involved. I don’t have my characters fined tuned, or macros that allow you to do amazingly complex activities. I do consider myself a decent player though.

Which leads to this blog. I have started reading several of the WoW blogs out there and a lot of them are enlightening, informative and entertaining. This is not one of those blogs. I won’t give you advice on the “must have” gear or how best to put your spec together for maximum effectiveness. You won’t see me breaking down the how and why of things in WoW. You’ll be lucky if I make sense most of the time. What you will get are my observations and insights of the game through my eyes, some of the reasoning and thinking behind my characters and I, triumph and frustrations of being an average player, and maybe an entertaining horror story here or there of PUGs gone horribly wrong. It’s a place for me to get things out of my system without forcing my co-workers and guild-mates to put up with my nattering. Hope you enjoy the ride.