shawn wants me to write a WoW update, and given that I have not much else to write about right now, and lots of homework I'm avoiding, here's a WoW update!
My first impressions of the game, before I even saw a login window, were frustration, annoyance, irritation, and the irate desire to punch puppies. I'd been incredibly spoiled with the ease of Guild Wars, or had somehow blocked out whatever hurdle I'd had to climb, cross, or circumvent at the time.
The issue wasn't actually a fault of the game, however, so I couldn't really send dog-poo parcels to Blizzard - I'm saving up a nice, smelly stash for party-poo-packages to Atkinson and Conroy (the two men Australia holds responsible for the potential games block to Australia later this year).
No, the problem (aside from these two men raining on my parade) was that I only have a whopping 10GB of bandwidth allocation a month, which means downloading a game like WoW over a regular connection would have me on dial-up speeds for the rest of the month. The last part of the game I downloaded, for reference, was 6.5GB - I'm not sure how much the entire game is, but, there's no way I'd have been able to get it all just by letting it run its course by itself.
Thankfully, my ISP - Internode - has a bunch of unmetered links where I can download these things directly without nibbling into my bandwidth allocation. Unfortunately this means hunting down the necessary files and installing them 'manually', one by one. I'm no dummy, but I did find this confusing and frustrating, and I was tempted once or twice to give up - because I hadn't invested more than a passing interest in a trial account at that point.
It turned into a game in and of itself, Installing WoW.. one of those quests where you turn in a reward only to find there's MORE. I'd get one patch installed and 'oh look, another patch to download!', and off I'd go looking for the next file. Internode, for all its usefulness, only had a long list of files that included patches in French and German and God knows what else, so it wasn't a matter of downloading everything on the page in order, I had to hunt down what I needed.
In the end - as of last week - my WoW directory was about 30GB of files and patches, and my HD - which only had 60GB, was so full that my download of Wrath of the Lich King stalled and I had to start over again - I think I mentioned this in another entry on my Murphy's Monday. I've since figured out what I don't need and backed it up elsewhere, but OMG WTF?!
So, yes, my first impressions of WoW were 'not impressed'. It would have been much easier if I lived just about anywhere else in the world.
But moving on.
On my trial account I made myself a Night Elf because that's what people seem to do. I figured I'd launch into the most gimmicky character to see if I could get over the stupid ears - though they were the least of my appal by the time I got through my first couple of quests. Night Elves (the girls at least) run like TODDLERS. And if you leave them standing still for too long, they do a little bounce on the spot for the sole purpose of jiggling bits 'back into place'.
I haven't really embraced any night elf characters since. Limited character customisation, coupled with limited camera angles to view said character made the race not especially appealing, though I do like that start area and imported a human to play with one of Rae's characters there.
The environment is a whole lot nicer since I beefed up my desktop - such as it is - to 3GB of RAM instead of 1GB, and there are some absolutely stunning views! Perhaps not as intricate or 'realistic' as Guild Wars, that has some incredible landscapes, but the 'other worldliness' of WoW is really lovely. It definitely feels like 'another world', while Guild Wars has enough connection with 'our world' that, honestly, I don't think the environments can be fairly compared. I love GW for its realism and attention to detail - crazy as fawk monsters notwithstanding - and I'm enjoying WoW for it's fantasy elements - especially those night elf areas.
I hadn't finished my trial before Rae remembered she had an Invite-A-Friend 'thingie' and I swapped from that account to create a new one - so she could get some kind of mount or other (?) - and, dummy that I am, rerolled a night elf on another server. Uther wound up being the new 'home base', after starting on Steam-somethingorother- Cartel-orwhatever.
I barely got off the first boat so hadn't really seen a lot at that point, but I'd thought the other players were
really, really nice! I couldn't go anywhere without some random person giving me a buff, and there I was too much of a noob to figure out who or how to thank them. But Uther was even friendlier! It was crazy nice, though maybe there wouldn't have been so many nice people around if I hadn't started playing during some Spring festival type thing attracting egg hunters in bunny ears.
Still, that is probably my favourite part of the game so far - and I've moved on a bit since then - how randoms will launch a buff or enchantment at me then vanish into the crowd.
The recent summer festival had a lot of horde coming into the cities, and I learned the hard way that clicking a horde character to check its health after being beaten up by twenty alliance means I've targeted myself and one hit later am hunting Ironforge for my missing body. After that res (and with lesson learned), some 70-something character chased me out to give me a heal then ran away again.
I think in this respect, I definitely like the social aspect of WoW over GW, because you only see other characters taking care of each other in combat, which is just the dynamics of the game. In WoW, apparently lending a buff is like saying 'hi', and even if I can't talk to Horde characters, I've lost count of how many have waved and flirted with me. :D
Not surprisingly, I have alt-itis here too, though there's a bit more of a commitment involved with levelling. After my lack-of-connection with the toddler-running-style of night she-elves, I opted for a human rogue, because... well, I figured I'd stick with a character if I modelled one after my favourite RP persona - aka, Knox. So, she's a rogue, a miner, and an engineer - because damnit, she's the sort to build herself a hog. Probably a bit more than I should have bitten off to chew as a first real investment in a character - especially since I completely bollocksed up the talent points (OMG so hilarious to discover there's a scroll bar in that window!) - but she's been heaps of fun! I love pick pocketing! \o/
I also decided at about lvl 37 that she needed a cat, and not a horse, for a mount. She's just not the sort to ride a horse - yes, game decisions made for RP characters are lame, but I am what I am :p - and by 38 she was Exalted with Darnassus. I thought it would be harder, but really it was just time-consuming. I understand it's been made a lot easier sometime before I started playing..?
Hunter-type characters are more my style, and I have a few non-starters and one finally moving forward, which will probably be my next character to progress, but I've also got a priest muddling about, the Most Adorable Gnome Ever, and a dwarf called Gryme (grimey). However, all these character have to wait for the moment because Knox turned 55 recently and now I'm gallivanting about with a Death Knight - which is oh so much silly fun. She's moving through Outlands and has made plans to destroy a giant Fel robot that keeps killing her partner in crime. Not yet, though; at 63 she'd just be toe-jam.
Apparently there are flying mounts around the next corner, too, though I'm sad to realise that the reason I haven't seen anyone riding them yet isn't because they're so rare, but because they can only be used in two parts of the game. Still, she's picking flowers and selling them to save up for the skill and whatever crazy-looking creature she gets to ride.
And, I guess that's about where I'm up to in WoW so far. Apparently I haven't hit the 'real content' yet, so I'll see how that goes when I get there.