New surroundings (soon)

I found a great place to move to this weekend and will be moving in later this week. Needless to say, all the apartment hunting didn't leave me any time to play WoW, even with the holiday. Once I got the go ahead it was time to start packing and cleaning up my current place, so those activities kept me busy. Will I have any time to play this week? Only time will tell, but I'm gonna guess that if I do it will be very limited. Once I get my living situation squared away I should have plenty of time, but for now you might not see a post for a couple of weeks, because on top of moving I will be going to Hawaii next week, and vacationing means no WoW. Hang ten everybody!

Trying to get in the groove

I was excited to start playing again, and I know I'll get back into it pretty soon, but trying to plan out my WoW time is gonna take some getting used to again. It doesn't really help that I'm trying to move in the next couple weeks and I want to get most of my stuff packed and in boxes early so that on the day of the move all I have to do is carry them out of the house. I also have to set aside a lot of time to check out new places to live so I'll be pretty busy these next few weeks, but hopefully after this whole fiasco is overwith I will be able to get back into it again.

I had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend the other day about my videogame playing while we're together. See, initially I was under the impression that she hated when I would play videogames while she was around, and because we're together pretty much every day after we each get off work, it basically left me with no gaming time. That is until this conversation was brought up. I don't remember how I worded it exactly, but now that I'm moving (and since I will be moving to an area that is actually closer to her job than her own place is) she will probably be at my place even more often than she is now, and she asked if I thought I would get tired of her. Well of course not, and even if I was going to I wouldn't say that, but I said she'd have to give me some videogame time, and to my surprise she agreed. She basically said as long as she has her own laptop with her and internet to connect to, she could care less if we sit there mindlessly watching TV or if we're both on our respective computers playing WoW or surfing the net. I know I can't just play all the time, but it's good to know she understands that I need some gaming time and that she's willing to let me have it as long as it doesn't leave her with nothing to do.

So things are looking up, I just have to figure out where I'm moving to. I got a few places to check out this weekend and I will hopefully have a pretty good idea of where I will be moving once that's done. Wish me luck!

And into it again

I played again yesterday for the first time in a couple weeks, and it was just like I remembered. I guess a couple weeks isn't really enough time to forget what it's like, but whatever.

So after sitting there at the character selection screen for about 5 minutes debating which character to play, I finally decided to go with my shaman. She's in Feralas, and I guess I left in the middle of doing some quests because I started out in the middle of nowhere. I didn't really have much time to play, but I did find a backpack from a missing courier in the gnoll camps to the southeast, then proceeded to find the guy in the silithid tunnels even further south of there. He was in pretty bad shape, but he made his way out without my help so it was all good, I didn't want to deal with escorting him anyway. After that I had to get going so I turned in the quest and logged.

I'm not sure if I want to keep going on the shaman just yet, I might pick up one of my higher level characters and push them to 70 so I will be able to see Northrend when the expansion comes. I'm actually pretty excited about rolling a deathknight, and now with all the info leaked from the beta testers I'm getting pretty antsy. It would be nice if they at least told us the release date, but I guess they probably aren't exactly sure when they will work out all the bugs and don't want to say anything prematurely. I know every time I see a release date pushed back I get a little more disappointed, so maybe they are doing a good thing by keeping us in the dark for now. I think for now I will pick up my druid again and see how far his rested experience takes him before it runs out, and judging by how little I will be playing it probably will take him pretty far.

Hopefully my post about quitting didn't lose me all my readers, because I'm back now and will continue on until I find out whether or not I am going to get any kind of compensation for all the stuff that was stolen from me.

Back for now

I said I was going to quit WoW for a while, and at the time I meant it, but recent events have changed my mind. My house was broken into this past weekend while I was away camping and all of my gaming equipment was stolen, including my 55" HDTV (not sure how they got that one out so easily), XBOX360, Wii, and all the games and accessories that went along with them, plus my GameCube games that were lumped in with the rest of them. Weird thing was they left a lot of other valuable stuff, including almost all of my DVDs, all the retro systems (NES, N64, etc.), my desktop computer, PC games, guitars, and pretty much everything else that was in that room. My roommates were home too so they left the upstairs alone, which luckily meant my laptop and everything else in my room went untouched. Under the circumstances, it leads me to believe it was done by somebody one of my roommates has had over before (one roommate in particular), because they knew what they were taking and everything else was left alone, plus we have an alarm system but don't turn it on, and with all the stickers on the house telling people it's there they must have known that.

When I got home from camping and found out what happened I had the police come and file a report with a list of what was stolen. My roommates gave names of people that have been here before that they suspected could have done it as well. We were also able to find some fingerprints on the back window where they must have broken in, and this will hopefully lead to finding out who did it, and maybe even getting some of my stuff back.

I've decided I'm moving out as soon as possible and this time I will be living on my own. I do like having roommates around, but if it means there's a chance they're going to bring over shady people that will see my stuff and decide to break in and steal it I will pay more rent to live on my own.

Either way, I have no games left besides a bunch of old stuff, so WoW will have to keep me occupied until I find out what's going to happen with all this. If this is a sign that I shouldn't have stopped playing, I wish it could have been done without me losing a couple thousand dollars worth of my stuff, but I'm glad nobody who was home at the time had anything bad happen to them. Anybody with roommates, make sure they don't bring over anyone they think could be capable of something like this, or just don't live with anyone that knows that type of people.

Greener pastures

I am taking a break from WoW for the time being. I was really looking forward to the new expansion, and maybe its release will bring me back, but for now I don't have the time to justify the monthly cost I am paying. I will stop blogging here, as this is a WoW blog and it doesn't make sense if I'm not playing WoW, but I will be starting a new blog where I will post on a wide variety of geeky topics, so go check it out if you're into that:

http://geek-or-not.blogspot.com/

For the rest of you, happy hunting in WoW, and if you need any suggestions of what else to read then look no further than my blogroll, every one of those WoW bloggers is intelligent, fun to read, and just all around benefits to the WoW community.

Unproductive

Well this week has been fairly unproductive. I haven't had much time to play with all my other obligations suddenly coming up one after the other. Usually I get at least one free day during the week, but not this time, my only play time was for about half an hour right before I had to be somewhere. I'm starting to feel like WoW may not fit into my life at this point. I would love to keep playing, but for how often I play I'm not sure the monthly fee is worth it. I have an Xbox360 and a Wii, so I have plenty of other games I can play casually, without a fee, and where I can get something accomplished without having to set aside a significant amount of time. I've actually been neglecting pretty much all my other games due to playing WoW and I kinda want to play something different without feeling guilty over losing WoW time. Luckily if I were to cancel my subscription, WoW keeps all your characters on the server still, waiting for you to resubscribe and pick back up again. Not sure if everyone knows about that so I just wanted to say that it isn't like Blizzard's other online games where your account can expire and you lose everything, you will be able to come back to WoW whenever you want and your characters will all still be there again, as if you had never left them.

I actually considered cancelling a little less than a year ago. I had been in school before that and only worked part time, plus had no significant other at the time so I had lots of free time on my hands and was playing every day. That all changed when I graduated, found a job, and was working full time with no idea how to change around my regular schedule to accomodate. When I tried to cancel I logged onto the account management page, clicked the option to cancel, and even though it said it was cancelled I wanted to make sure so I opened up WoW, tried logging in, and for some reason it still worked. Seems like I would have gotten some kind of message saying the account is no longer active, but it worked just like if I never hit the cancel button, so I kept playing since I was still paying. Has anyone else tried cancelling before? Does it automatically reinstate your account if you try to log back into the game?

Now I'm at the point where I want to play, but even though I try to plan out some free time, something else seems to always come up at the last minute and I'm getting pretty frustrated. The way my friends are, they will call me with something to do, and if I say I'm busy I have to tell them what exactly I'm busy with before they will accept it, and I can't justify telling them I'd rather play WoW. Sure I could lie and give them some other excuse, but in my mind I know what my real excuse is, and in my opinion WoW will never take precedence over RL stuff. I guess it isn't so much that I don't want to play, or even that I don't have time, I just find myself constantly getting my hopes up for some play time and being disappointed when I don't get it. WoW is a game where it's hard to just stop playing when something comes up. Many times I find myself logging out in the middle of a quest, not wanting to hearth because I don't want to have to run all over again, and there's a chance that when I log back in I will show up right on top of a mob. I like being able to manage my time, but Luckily I really have no connections to people in the game, pretty much all the friends I had have quit playing, so I won't have to worry about leaving anyone behind.

Well this idea is still in the works, but don't be surprised if my next post says I'm quitting.

More classes?

A while ago I let my roommate start a character on my account and play a bit to see how he liked it. He went on to level his mage to 50 before he finally went and bought the game on his own. Now he has a level 70 warlock on his own account that he does PVP with, while I'm stuck with no characters at 70 still. We didn't talk about playing too much, tried to keep away from making WoW our topic of conversation, especially around other people, but he did mention to me how he would like more classes to be in the game, and I agreed with him at the time, with my habit of starting alts how could I not? I remember my other friend that got me started on WoW telling me about Everquest and how many more classes there were in that game than in WoW, so I went to check out what classes they had and how they were different from eachother.

Let me say first that I have changed my mind on WoW needing so many more classes. This is not to say that I don't welcome the addition of hero classes, it will be fun to have different abilities to play around with and come up with new strategies for killing things, but on a purely practical, group dynamic standpoint, WoW has just as many classes as any other MMO, they just make it seem like there aren't. What I mean is, while the number of classes isn't quite the same as some, with the different talent trees you can follow for each class, it's almost like having 3 classes per character, although more so with the hybrid classes.

While most RPG games tend to set the role you will play in a group when you initially choose your class, WoW gives you options later on that let you choose how you are going to play that character, and they let you redistribute points if you want so you can try something else out without having to play another character. I think this is shown best through the hybrid classes, namely the paladin, druid, and shaman. All of these classes can hold their own as healers, DPS (paladin somewhat lacking here), and pallies and druids can make great tanks. Now most MMOs will give you choice of character, then your fate is sealed from that point on, but as you can see, with WoW you can shape your character for your playstyle or your group's needs.

While the hybrid classes may have a bit more options, every other class can spec differently and play different roles as well. Priests can also be considered a sort of hybrid, as speccing shadow allows them to DPS, but maybe not as versatile as the true hybrid classes. Lets take a class that on the surface seems pure DPS, but can actually play very different roles in a group depending on spec. We are going to use a hunter for this, as they really have no way out of being a DPS class, but lets look a little deeper. Hunter talent trees specialize the hunter in a certain attribute they have that is unique to the class. What are those attributes? Pets, ranged damage, and trapping. If you've read any of BRK's stuff you know which attribute he likes best, but he also can tell you the advantages of the other attributes. The BM tree buffs your pet, making it a more essential part of your repertoire than the other specs and providing higher sustained damage output than the other specs can usually achieve. This comes at a price in difficulty though, as it is almost like playing two characters at once. Survivalists provide the ranged damage aspect of the hunter class, with the talents tending to buff the hunter and make his attacks hit harder and crit more often. Finally the survivalist class seems to be least used, and I think it has a lot to deal with being more of a utility spec than damage dealing. We all love to see ourselves deal huge amounts of damage, but the survivalist claim to fame is their ability to crowd control using traps, and that makes them just as important to a group. Now while all of those specs still play the DPS role, they are very different to play. Ask any hunter who has respecced and they will tell you they had to relearn many things to be able to play the new spec as effectively as possible.

So in my opinion WoW has plenty of classes, they are just hidden within the talent trees. If they were going to make too many more classes it would come to the point where they would just take some attributes of one class and combine them with other attributes from another class. We can see this in the humanoid mobs we fight. Shadowmages? Just combines warlock shadow magic and mage fire magic. Sorceresses? Just combines mage ice magic and priest holy magic. Probably ideas for classes that Blizzard decided didn't need to be playable for just that reason. I look forward to the hero classes they promised us, but I don't see them making any new starter classes for us, although if they did then I would definitely be making more alts.