Happy New Year!
It’s great to be back home! Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy seeing the family during the holidays, but I was out of internet contact for roughly five days last week. Once the 24-hour shakes stopped and I could keep down solid food, real life was quite interesting at the beach in Florida. Next year we’re going dark for seven days. Not sure I’ll make it.
We visited my in-laws near Tampa after the beach holiday and I quickly picked up the needle, I mean wireless internet connection and life was back to normal. Somewhat. Playing World of Warcraft on my laptop is not quite as fun as playing it on my 20 inch Dell LCD screen. But I adjusted.
The best part of the New Year is that it signals 15-days until 9 million or so people call in sick for work to play The Burning Crusade. Rumor has it that the servers will be ready by noon (not sure if that is PST, EST, or what) for TBC content.
Jonathan is experiencing the phases that many WoW initiates go through as they discover just how interesting the game can be. I’ve played WoW since the second or third week of its initial release. I look back on the days leveling my first character to 60 as the “I didn’t know” and “I had no idea” time period. What was a fun and interesting experience blossomed into an absolute ugly gaming obsession after level 60. You won’t understand what I am talking about until that first successful raid, that piece of epic gear drops and makes you even more uber, or discovering all of the nuances of faction reputation and the need for it.
Not to mention my latest obsession – the battlegrounds.
Life was so simple during my initial leveling days because “I had no idea” what fun awaited at level 60. The largest folder in my Firefox browser is the World of Warcraft bookmarked links. You need to understand the pre-raid item sets you’ll need (and where/how to get them ), the best fire resist sets for your class (and how much they’ll need), the nature resist sets, and what goodies await when faction rep is gained with all sorts of leagues/tribes/groups. Throw in trinket and ring information that is essential to your class, and that is a lot of gaming minutia to worry about.
I just spent an hour or so calculating the number of Arathi Basin, Warsong Gultch, and Alterac Valley tokens I’ll need to get my Field Marhsall complete pvp armor and weapon set. And the honor points I’ll need to get them.
So my advice to all new WoW gamers is – get to 60 as fast as you can. Yes it’s nice to smell the roses along the way, but the game begins at 60. After the 16th, the game will begin after 70. Sigh.
