Ding?

I hit 63 last night, or should I say dinged 63? Why do we even say 'ding' anyway? The sound the game makes when you level up isn't really a ding, at least not like the ding you hear at the beginning of a boxing match, or when you kick somebody in the nuts in a wrestling videogame (never understood why they added the 'ding' there either, but it makes it funny). I always wonder if people are actually hearing the ding in their head when it happens just because thats what everyone says when it happens. This brings me to another point about online chatting in general and the acronyms we have started using. When you read 'lol' do you actually imagine the other person laughing or do you literally read it as lol (not l-o-l, but lol), like it was actually a word rather than the acronym for 'laughing out loud'. I actually read it literally, which I always thought was strange, because while I know what it means, it doesn't register like that for me, and I always have trouble pronouncing 'lmfao', or 'rofl' for that matter, how the hell are you supposed to say those? And don't even get me started on all the acronyms for the different instances. I remember before the expansion and before I had gotten very far in the game I would run around the capital cities and see all the group announcements for instances like UBRS and thinking "wtf is ubers?" Same thing with LBRS (elbers) and the various other high end instances. Do other people do this? I know my friend looked at me weird when I told him that was out I read internet chat, but I can't be the only one, besides the people who don't actually know what those things stand for.

OK, so I 'dinged' 63 last night with my druid, but not until I got ganked right at pretty much the worst possible moment. So I was still tearing up some stuff in that cave, and while there are a few quests that send you there, pretty much everyone I saw went about their own business, not really bothering to kill opposing faction players. Then, when I'm about 1/2 a bar away from leveling this Tauren druid ambushes me from behind while I've trying to take down two mobs at once, so obviously I died, but druids in cat form, as with rogues, have a tendency to stick around in stealth and camp you, but since you can't see them you don't know whether they left or are just waiting. Well at that point I really wanted to be done with grinding, so I ran back to my corpse, took a little bathroom break just so if he was waiting for me he might get bored and move on, then came back and rezzed. Lucky for me he wasn't still around, but the point is it was going along so well, I was just about to level when that bastard had to come from behind and gank me. Within the time it took to run back to my corpse I probably would have leveled and been able to get out of there, which I think is the thing that gets to me the most. Oh well, I leveled, did a few quests and turned them in, and called it a night, so it was a successful session I guess.

This brings me to an awesome world PVP story, or at least what I thought was awesome at the time. I was on my rogue, my main and only character at the time, minding my own business in Arathi Highlands, just exploring basically because it was my first time there and I was only level 32 or 33, so this was probably only a few months after I started the game. All of a sudden this Tauren druid (seems to be a theme here) that runs up in travel form, transforms out, and proceeds to root me, then spams moonfire. Now that I've played a druid I know that probably wasn't the smartest tactic he could have used, but it was working on me, being pretty new to the game. So I had to think "I can't win this, I just have to figure out how to run away" and I since his moonfire was still ticking there was no point in using vanish because the next tick would break stealth anyway. Then I remembered my gnome racial Escape Artist, so I used that to free myself from the roots, then ran at the guy and gouged him. I thought about trying to take him out, but then decided I had no chance so I ran for it, used sprint and waited til I was out of sight range before using vanish and getting off the road and hiding in some bushes. Sure enough, I see him running to where he thought I was going, travel form of course since he was trying to catch up, and held my breath as he ran past on the road and just kept going. Didn't see him again after that, but I just remember how hard my heart was pounding from the rush that gave me, even more so because while I was still new to the game, I had been able to escape. I think that was the moment that made me glad I was on a PVP server.