Free Candy For Everyone

I got an exciting email today from Blizzard, telling me that I’d been selected to participate in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. Yes, I get to take my precious spare time and test their pre-release software and like it. So I got home from work, all excited to give it a try and started the process to install the Beta client.

Five hours later, it’s still downloading. Hopefully it’ll finish up soon and I’ll be able to take a look. It’s funny, because I was so super excited about the idea of getting into the beta and seeing everything that’s going on with the game. Now that it comes down to it, I don’t know how much I’ll actually play the beta. You don’t get to keep any progress you make - everything is subject to change as well. I think I’ll take a little tour of the new world, maybe post some pictures, but try not to get too caught up in it.

There are a lot of people playing World of Warcraft out there, something like 10 million, in fact. For almost three years, I have been one of them. Which bets the question, why am I still playing after all this time?

Start with the obvious: the game is constantly changing and updating. The second character I ever made was a Paladin. I got her to level 29 and stopped because I just didn’t find her fun. I still haven’t gotten a pally above 35, but the last one I started was an eye opener. Everything was different! So many new abilities and complete changes to the way the class played, it was a completely new experience. Plus, Blizzard is always adding new quests and raids to play in. Getting a whole new dungeon to play in is always awesome.

There’s always another character class. At this point I have 3 70s - a mage, a shaman and a priest. I have characters of the other 6 classes scattered around across the level spectrum and I’m always up for leveling a new alt. Some people get tired of the “level grind” but the excitement of getting new spells/abilities and figuring out how to use them is just plain awesome to me.

But finally, there’s the real reason I haven’t quit WoW: the people. This one seems obvious, but it’s only in the last 6 months that I had any characters that I played purely with people I met online. In the past, I always played with real life friends, which is awesome, but I was always in small guilds of around 10 people and we never did any serious endgame content. My shaman is in a casual raiding guild and I’ve had the chance to experience 10 man and 25 man content. I love seeing new things, and I love being able to log on and see someone I know at any hour of the day. There’s usually someone around to help out with whatever.

All in all, I’m still wrapped up in WoW. I still don’t have a character at 70 who’s for serious PvP, or a character for tanking, so I’m leveling some more. Someday I’m sure it’ll all be too much, I’ll have done it all and finally feel ready to move on to something new. But for now, it’s been a fun three years, and I’m sure Wrath of the Lich King will only serve to feed my addiction more. Here’s to too much time online!

I’m 70! For the third time! That’s right, tonight I hit 70 (the current maximum level) on another character in World of Warcraft. You’d think it’s all been there, done that but somehow, after just shy of three years, I’m still playing the game pretty much every day.

I’ve given a lot of thought to why I’m still playing and I keep meaning to share it hear, but then it’s late and I think it’s time to go to bed… I promise, I’ll return and have new thoughts to relate and soon!

I took my beloved Macbook Pro in to the Apple store yesterday for an attempt to discover why it gets so hot it could cook bacon. That left me without a computer last night, and this was completely unacceptable. I decided to boot up my PC that has been pretty much sitting idle since I last spoke about it. Yeah, it kinda gets neglected.

After installing about a million updates for Windows, I tried to get World of Warcraft in a working order (while I haven’t spoken about WoW in a while I might possibly be more addicted to it right now then I’ve been in a long time, but that’s a topic for a later date). I decided to remove all my old UI addons and just start over since everything I had was so out of date. I was quickly hit with the dreaded User Account Control prompts. “Are you sure you want to do that?” quickly followed by “Do you want to allow permission to do that?” Um, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. After clicking about a million boxes just so I could delete some files I was getting frustrated.

Then I installed the WoWAce Updater. This is a nice program that will auto download and install addons for you. You just go in and select them and then it does its thing. Well, it was just erroring and erroring. After some searching on the forums I found that I needed to change the folder permissions on the Addon folder it was trying to download to. Hmm, ok, but I’m an Administrator, shouldn’t it just work? I check the folder permissions and admins have full permission, wtf? I decide “hell, I’ll give Users full permissions too.” And that seemed to do the trick, ok, cool.

I load up WoW and my screen explodes in a overload off too many addons, with error boxes popping up left and right. Hmm. I check and ALL MY OLD ADDONS ARE STILL LOADED. I search my harddrive, they’re not in the World of Warcraft Addon folder anywhere. HOW ARE THEY RUNNING? I poke around some more and find a backup directory of old addons in a random folder no where near the game, which I delete. I run the game and they are still all there. I search my ENTIRE HARD DRIVE for those files and they are NO WHERE. So now I’m getting pissed. I blame Vista.

I decide to remove my entire folder for Addons instead of just bits and parts. So I try to move it to my desktop. After clicking a bunch of times that yes, I really want to do that, it then pops up a dialogue telling me I don’t have permission. I AM AN ADMINISTRATOR!!!! I do some searching, change some permisions, and try again. And fail again. I AM AN ADMINISTRATOR!!! Vista doesn’t care, it’s “keeping me safe”. I try changing some other stuff after reading online but ultimately, I do what I should have done from the first, I turn off User Account Control. Thank you. It’s quiet now.

I move the folder and reboot WoW and no addons at all, that’s an improvement! I carefully copy back in everything piece by piece, waiting for it to find deleted addons, but it never does. After maybe an hour or more of fussing, I’m finally in game and ready to play. But boy am I tired.

Ultimately, the performance of my PC is lacking. I mean, that’s alright, it’s probably over 3 years old, it’s amazing it’s still viable at all! But I think I might upgrade the video card and that could be sufficient to keep it working well enough for a few more years. Provided I can find a copy of Windows XP to downgrade to.

I fear it’s happened again. I hit 70 with my Shaman and my interest in playing her has dropped off. I’ve always been a huge fan of leveling characters. Getting to the next level, seeing what new skills I get, knowing there’s an area I couldn’t get to yesterday that will be open to me tomorrow, these are all aspects of progression I enjoy. But now that Myrendra is 70 all that’s left is getting better gear.

At this point we grind reputation, we grind honor, we farm instances all as methods to the same goal of better gear. This new gear let’s us enter new raid instances, and that’s about the only thing I find at all interesting about this whole process. Sure I’d love to be geared out in fantastic purple epics and riding a super l33t flying dragon but I don’t really want to grind hours every day to get the gold and such required. Grinding doesn’t equal fun.

I’ve started another alt. Of course I have. Heh. I’m still playing my Shaman, but only to run instances with people. The social group aspect is always fun. Running through a dungeon and trying to down things that are a challenge keeps me thinking and on my toes! That’s fun. But running around on my (super slow) flying mount and gathering herbs for hours? Nah, I can’t do too much of that. That’s not playing, that’s some sort of job and the one I have is more than enough of that. There are still dungeons I haven’t been into at all and I’d really like to get around to those, but not if the entry fee is hours of repetition. In the meantime, you’ll find me leveling another druid. Or maybe a warlock. Or maybe…