Who would have thought

I never thought I would be this dedicated to a game when I started out, then again, I had never really played an MMORPG before WoW, so I really didn't know what to expect. I started the game out on a pretty crappy system. Sure I had a 128mb Radeon video card, but I also only had 384mb of RAM and my processor was a 1.5 GHz AMD, so needless to say, the first time I got into Ironforge I thought something was terribly wrong. I thought my processor was just too slow to handle the game, even after I had put all the video settings to pretty low quality, did I mention the max resolution on my monitor was 800x600? For a long time I played the game like that, dreading the trip to IF because of the massive lag I would get, and I finally told my friend, who was playing with me at the time, about what was going on and that I wanted to upgrade my computer without spending too much money. He tells me to get more RAM, probably the cheapest way to go about it, and went on to explain to me how much it helped him when he had the same problem. I guess I was under the impression that it was mostly the processor, but a few days later I took out the stick of 128 and popped in a stick of 512 next to the 256 and basically doubled the RAM I had, strolled on over to IF and lo and behold, lag was down considerably, almost down to none. I was so happy. How had I not spent the 60 bucks to do this before now? Such an easy upgrade and since I was used to bad quality video at this point anyway, I was happy to play in that mode as long as I didn't have to deal with the lag that my lack of RAM had been providing. Well now I've upgraded to a sweet laptop with some high end hardware, so I run it in widescreen mode with all the high end video stuff turned on and it runs smooth as silk, but I played to 60 on two characters before that upgrade, and never thought I'd still be playing 3 years after I got the game.

I guess the only other games I've ever played with this much enthusiasm were Diablo II and Chrono Trigger. D2 was flat out awesome, and I of course had one character of each class, and managed to get most of them to a fairly high level before burning out on it. I would love to see an amazon type character in WoW, expert with throwing weapons and polearms, maybe add some javelins to the game, but I guess they would have to figure out a way to make lore for that first. Problem with D2 was there was really no end game content, once you beat the game on Hell difficulty the only thing left to do was collect gear, and then people made bot programs and it got way too out of control for me. By the time they introduced the uber bosses I had already quit and since they deleted your characters after 3 months of inactivity, I really didn't want to start it up again, but I had a good run. Chrono Trigger is probably my favorite game ever, and while I've probably spent more total hours on WoW, it's only because I managed to do pretty much everything in Chrono Trigger. I don't remember how many game endings there were, but there were a bunch, and I managed to get every one of them, plus gathered the best gear for everyone, which meant playing through the game multiple times as you could only get one of those items each time through, but could carry your characters over in a New Game +, which started the game over but with your old characters. I also played pretty much all the games in the Final Fantasy series, including getting an NES emulator and playing translated versions of the games that had only been released in Japan until recently. I suppose it just makes sense that my RPG addiction would carry over to the massive online versions, and my tendency to want to beat games completely, without shortcuts, just adds to why I've stuck with it this long, besides the fact that there is so much content that I still haven't seen, but I intend to see it before I quit.

Back to what I've been up to. I did some more Outland stuff, but forgot to buy that Nethergarde Bitter the dwarf wants in Hellfire Peninsula before I headed over there, so had to run one of my other characters over there and send it to my priest, along with some rune cloth, to save time so I could get the follow up he gives. I was going to give the priest a break, but I have so much rest XP that I want to use up first, though that may take a while yet. Killed some bird men and birds, then some ravagers, then stonescythes, turned in some quests, and called it a night. It really seemed to take longer than it should have to finish those quests, but I might not have been paying attention the entire time with the TV being on and all.