With the release of The Burning Crusade (TBC) expansion pack, my interest in World of Warcraft has been reinvigorated. Thanks to a friend at Blizzard I got into the beta for TBC and really enjoyed the starting areas for both the new races (Blood Elves and Draenei).
I decided to renew my subscription when TBC released in January and I’ve been playing steadily since. Some friends and I picked one of the brand new servers called “Velen” that came up on TBC’s release date so we wouldn’t be overshadowed by people who had been playing for years. It’s a “PvE” server, so there’s no unwanted PvP in the game. In other words, members of the opposing faction won’t be killing you as you quest unless you turn your PvP flag on. The tradeoff is that you can’t kill them either.
My main character is named Dawkins, an obvious homage to famous scientist, skeptic and athiest Richard Dawkins. It makes me chuckle that a character with “holy power” is named after someone who doesn’t believe in it. What’s great is that as you progress through the levels you find out that the Blood Elf paladins aren’t exactly all that holy and their power has been more siezed from than granted by a beneficent entity.
Here’s Dawkins on his new “Epic Mount”. When I first got it I showed it off to Mel and she starting sing-songing “You ride a unicorn, nyah, nyah…” but I instantly pointed out that the barding had six horns which made it a “Sexicorn” and that’s pretty damned cool.
Blizzard has a cool new feature called the Armory, which lets you view a character through an excellent web interface. Here’s the page for Dawkins, in case you want to check him out.
Unfortunately, most of the people who joined me on the new server haven’t been playing much. A lot of them are busy, others have high-level characters on other servers they’d rather level up first. So I’m putting out a call to friends who may have thought about trying out WoW but haven’t yet: join me! There’s a 10 day free trial so you can “try before you buy”, though it has a few restrictions (no trading, level cap of 20, chat channel limitations). But hey, it’s free and you can upgrade it to an unrestricted account at any time. I’m pretty sure the game should suggest the “Velen” server to anyone on the west coast who signs up, but if it doesn’t you can press “View Realm List” after it suggests and change to Velen to join me.
But your are a godly level 66, and I would be but a 1 or so. Were you considering starting a new character if a few people join up? Mayhap Jim and I could both get involved.
I have other characters on the server too, some of which I’d love to play with, but not solo, so that’d be perfect!
So yes, you absolutely should. Thanks to having a very-high level character I can hook you guys up with bags and a bit of starting cash (both of which make a HUGE difference when playing).
The last thing I want to do is play computer games now.