My Playstyle

I like to think of my playstyle as almost casual but not quite. I think the best way to describe it would be I'm a binge player. You know those people who say they aren't alcoholics because they don't drink every day, but then when they do drink they get plastered every time? Well thats how I play WoW. Let's take this past couple weeks for example. I think I played once or twice last week for an hour or two each time, but the week before there were 4 or 5 days in there that I played for over 3 hours. I guess the main reason for this is that I never really have a set schedule that I can plan on, most of my activities are last minute ideas, and I would feel lame telling someone I would rather play a videogame than do something fun IRL. Not to say if you have a scheduled raid or something you should bail on them, but I haven't gotten to that point in the game yet and don't really plan on it anytime soon, nobody in the game counts on me for anything and that seems to work well for me.

I would also say that I'm the definition of a solo player. This mentality was probably brought over from my Diablo 2 days, that game was definitely geared more towards playing solo all the time unless you needed help. When I first got the game I didn't even have an internet connection, and thats how I learned to play, then I finally got hooked up and while playing in a group was fun, I was more comfortable on my own. Now I've moved on to a much bigger game in WoW, where the servers are filled with people and I'm just a drop in the bucket. I had a friend I played with all the time on my first character and we had a great time grouping up and helping each other with quests and such, but I didn't really make too many other friends in the game. At the time my brother and one of his friends also played on that server, so it seemed I had a pretty good group of people I could call upon for my grouping needs. I guess I should have known they would burn out on it, there was a good three months somewhere in there that I wasn't sure if I was going to continue playing. I came back, they didn't, and that left me alone on my server with very few connections, and my guild /gkicked me after the first month of inactivity so I was pretty bummed.

At that point I believe I decided to start my first alt. My rogue was level 58 or so and I just couldn't make that final push to 60 yet, so I made a druid and set out on a new adventure. I was actually able to convince my friend to roll a warrior for a while to run alongside my druid, but he stopped around level 35 and hasn't played since. He has since discovered Call of Duty 4 and I can't get him to come back. Now with my lack of in-game friends I had a couple options. I could try to make some friends, offer to group with people, maybe even try to make an impression and get a guild invite where I could once again be part of a community. The problem with this option was I didn't think it would be fair to a guild if I joined, only to play a few hours a week on average, usually with not enough time to do much more than knock out a few quests and then log, so I decided I wouldn't go searching for a guild, but if a casual guild were to offer to take me in I wouldn't pass it up.

Upon finding out how much I liked playing my druid, I couldn't help but wonder if playing another class would broaden my horizons even more, and my altism continues to this day. Now I really had to think out how I was going to play the game, because in order to stay motivated I had to switch between alts fairly regularly, but it's hard to keep friends in the game when you switch between characters so often and your play time is so erratic. It would be a little weird if I found someone I liked to group with and they tell me "oh by the way, I randomly play different characters at irregular times, if you want to keep in touch here are the names of my alts..." I probably wouldn't bother with them if that was the case, but if they want to add me to their friends I won't stop them, they just won't see me very often.

So I guess I'm a binge soloer when it comes to my playstyle, and since I have no characters in the end game I have no problem with that for now. I do like to hear about how great the social aspect of the game is, and I think it's great that people are able to make friends and what it does to their playing experience, but I don't think I can commit to anything like that. Maybe that's why I started this blog, to have some sort of community for WoW, even if it's not actually in-game.