Your WoW Characters?

[Chazemataz]

God I love World of Warcraft!! I play for around 2-3 hours a day. i got it a few weeks ago, and cant get enough of it.
What are your character(s)?
Here are mine:

1.
Name: Darlamange
Class: Druid
Gender: Male
Race: Night Elf
Level: 11
Realm: Normal
Guild: im thinking of gathering up the gull to ask some friends to pay $15 a month to play it with me, but for now i roll solo... *sigh*

2.
Name: Luna
Class: Priest
Gender: Female
Race: Human
Level: 2
Realm: Role Playing
Guild: None
Proffession: Tailoring
Bio: Luna woke up on the steps of the church in Stormwind. She had no clue why she was there. In fact, she doesn't even remember her name! She names herself "Luna" because of the moon shining on her face when she woke up. She soon opened up a small tailoring shop, but she longs to find out the truth about her mysterious life before what she calls "The New Beggining".

3.
Name: CorZalo
Gender: Male
Race: Gnome
Class: Warlock
Realm: Roleplaying
Proffession: Engineering, Cooking
Level: 6
Bio: Cor Zalo's family was recently killed by who-knows-what. He was just out at his sick grandmother's house giving her some food he prepared himself and came home to his house ransacked and his family a bloody mess. Unsure of what to do, he takes off to seek help with only the protection of his demons, who have tormented, possesed, and protected him since he was born and his mechanical pets, who are the only family he has left.

4.
Name: MinjoZogo
Class: Shaman
Gender: male
Level: 3
Race: troll
Realm: Roleplaying
Proffession: none
Bio: Minjo-Zogo the Shaman has long been regarded as a nutcase and a lunatic. However, recently he has been recieving terrible visions from the ancestors... threatening, evil visions of impending doom for all the beings of the Alliance and the Horde. Will he convince everybody to believe him before its too late??

5.
Name:HoboGluute
Class: Hunter
Gender: Female
Level: 10
Race: Troll
Realm: Normal


So, who are your characters?

[Synthesis]

I have one real character,

Westood, Lvl 45 Nightelf Hunter of the Alliance.

I'd elaborate with a story, however, I'm going to be giving up WoW in the next few days, when my subscription ends, so...no need, heh.

[demented_are_go]

I am sooooooooo not touching that game, it's like crack for gamers, half of the office is addicted, they're going to have to come up with WoW rehab soon

[Synthesis]

I am sooooooooo not touching that game, it's like crack for gamers, half of the office is addicted, they're going to have to come up with WoW rehab soon

Apparently, Crack has to be pretty potent for it to effect me. Let me know whatever game turns out to be Gaming Cocaine....the grade A stuff.

[ElPresidente]

Can't say WoW hooked me either. I cancelled at the end of my first month's subscription. Level grind MMOs bore me. Gimme EVE anyday (although I just cancelled my sub since I don't get the time to play it).

[lilfaye]

I'll bite...

*winks*

I play on Cenarion Circle where ElPres used to play.. but uhh, he abandoned me hehe *coughs* :P

1.
Name: Lucidia
Class: Shaman (Resto/Elemental)
Race: Troll
Level: 60
Realm: RP
Guild: Currently... Team Penguin (Heavy End-game, Heavy PvP) :P

Cleared ZG, AQ20, Onyxia, MC and up to Chromaggus in BWL with her. Also have killed Kazzak, Azuregos and Taerar and partook in the damn Eranikus event for the AQ scepter quest which ended up crashing the server >.> Haven't touched TAQ (AQ40) yet though.

2.
Name: Areli (named after an old friend who was/is?? an active member of this community)
Class: Priest (Shadow/Disc)
Race: Undead
Level: 60
Realm: RP
Guild: Bane of the Legion (End-game)

Soon to be High Warlord.

3.
Name: Lilaea
Class: Priest (Holy/Disc)
Race: Night Elf
Level: mid-30's
Realm: RP
Guild: Swift Retribution (Old-school hardcore PvP guild turned heavy end-game)

4.
Name: Mags
Class: Warlock (Affliction)
Race: Undead
Level: Newly made - mid 20's
Realm: PvP - on one of the newer servers
Guild: GM of Lost Prophets (Eventually... Heavy end-game and Moderate PvP - based more on world PvP than the sad ruined honor grind that is Battlegrounds)

[Shadeling_SC]

I've got a bunch but I've been playing since beta.

My level 60 NE Hunter was one of the first hunters to reach level 60 on my main server Blackhand, but due to the fact that there were more female NE hunters than I could shake a dwarf at, I turned right around and rerolled a NE priest who became my raiding character.

Other than that, I have a level 45 gnome warlock, a 40 gnome mage, a level 40 NE druid, a level 32 undead warlock and a level 26 gnome rogue.


For me, I loved the fact that the punishment factor was much diminished in WoW. That's what I so hated in EQ. Ie, die once and the last two hours of my life were pretty much erased. Yuck.

[ihavenoteeth]

I have a lvl 60 dwarf priest on a pvp server, i really love the game. my guild clears mc bwl and is on the twin emps in aq40. i would hardly call wow a lvl grind, after 60 it's a little time consuming with 3-5 intances to clear every week and more on the way, its really a gear collecting thing.

[lilfaye]

I have a lvl 60 dwarf priest on a pvp server, i really love the game. my guild clears mc bwl and is on the twin emps in aq40. i would hardly call wow a lvl grind, after 60 it's a little time consuming with 3-5 intances to clear every week and more on the way, its really a gear collecting thing.


I would agree :P Getting to 60 is the easy part... maintaining the raid scheduals can get a bit tricky and instance farming for FR and NR gear (and soon Shadow and Frost resist gear) is a bit tedious at times. But at the same time, its all highly worth it.

[ElPresidente]

Oh man... this makes me want to play World of Warcraft again. (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-realm-tichondrius&t=257518&p=1&tmp=1#post257518)

Mega-drama!

[lilfaye]

Not sure if that's sarcasm :P

ElPres you should though ;) I'd help get you to 60... :P

EDIT!!

And after listening to that... Okay I laughed >.>

This is why..
A: You roll Horde.
B. You join a server that makes fun of drama - good example: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-realm-cenarioncircle&T=314150&P=1

*sad attempts*

Also : Anyone who joins a guild who's GM is named "Tinythunder" .... should know there will eventually be problems :P

[ElPresidente]

During most level ranges you have a couple of choices where to go and get quests and levels.

That's level grinding.

Most MMOs are level grinds. The only two exceptions I can think of that aren't are EVE Online (which is much more focused on player interaction and RP than character statistics growth) and A Tale in the Desert (which is about online collaboration between community members to do things like make art).

WoW is certainly one of the better level grind MMOs out there and isn't as a big a stickler for the form as some Korean MMOs like Lineage II, but it still a game with a big focus on level grinding.

Anyway I'm currently running an Undead Rogue on Frostmourne.... my recent Guild Wars addiction has made me decide to give the game another shot to see if my tastes have changed from when I played it last year.

Experience so far:

- Queues to get on to a server
- After waiting for four minutes to get into the server and spending a good five minutes deciding my character setup, being told that I was not allowed to create a character as there was a queue to get on the server and that I would have to wait til an off peak time before I'd be able to create my character.
- Waiting 2 hours post installation before finally being allowed to create a character.
- Later that night having the server freeze which resulted in another hour of trying to get back into the game only to keep being told a character with my name already exists and when I finall logged back in finding out that I had been killed while I was unable to log in.

The above may not be an indication of game design but it is an indication of the lacklustre work Blizzard is doing to manage their own success. They are shafting their customer base. In over 20 years as a gamer I've not seen worse technical issues in a game when it comes to preventing people from playing what they paid for. We aren't talking bugs here, they are unavoidable and are only found after the bug has done its work.

What we are seeing here is a big company not managing its own infrastructure and hurting their customer base.

CCP (EVE online) is an independant developer that is doing something much more difficult than WoW when it comes to the network tech yet they do not have these problems.

They aren't trying to manage a lot of small population cap servers (ala WoW), they are managing a massive server array (one of the largest super computer networks in the world, top 10 from memory) where 25,000 people are logged into the same game world at once. Not a few thousand in copies of a smaller world... 25,000 people in the same place.

CCP are a much smaller company than Blizzard and they are managing this with nary a hiccup. Anyone who buys any line saying this is unavoidable based on the game's popularity is kidding themselves. At the start yes, demand is difficult to predict but Blizzard have had well over a year to come to terms with growth projections and current activity levels. They have the money they are just not doing anything with it that goes to improving the current game experience from a technological standpoint.

Blizzard, you entered the MMO market so you MUST perform at the standard of other MMOs, any suggestions that you can't are... well... a load of horsecrap.

[ElPresidente]

Ya copped a 20 minute queue last night.

As for why people don't migrate from WoW, put simply marketing. There is an incredible amount of brand presence for WoW, Everquest has dropped off the radar and that's it. Everyone else is largely a no-body with only Guild Wars coming close and that's not really an MMO anyway (Everything outside of towns or outposts are instances).

[lilfaye]

ElPres hun, you chose the wrong server.

I've been stuck in 2 hour queues before. Log on, go make some dinner and come back to it kind of deal for Cenarion Circle. But the thing is, they fixed it and since then, I haven't seen a queue. A lot of the servers like Frostmourne and Destromath etc have incredibly high user population and are running on older servers. They just released a bunch of new servers about 2 months ago I believe all on completely new hardware and that's where I actually rerolled to, I went to Andorhal. And its incredible, no lag spikes, my latency never goes above 100ms and low server pop as a whole.

When I reroll on different servers or new servers and I want to find information about them before creating characters there I use a nifty little webpage to do a little research about the server statistics. http://www.warcraftrealms.com/realmstats.php

Its US Server only (I personally only play on US servers so.. I never needed to find a Euro version of these statistics) But it does help a lot. It even gives you the server's Alliance/Horde ratio as well as class and race ratios, complete server population, time zones the servers are on, etc...

Another note about their lack of hardware and server quality as far as actual performance, the new realms that were released a couple months ago were a test to see how they would do etc... and they went over real well.. They're in the process of switching many other realms over to the same type of deal to upgrade performance overall. It was a huge ordeal for awhile, they had to bring many realms down for it.

Not defending Blizzard here because trust me, there were nights we had to cancel raids or had to start from the beginning (when a server crashes while in an instance many times, the mobs will all respawn and you have to reclear all the trash) of a raid due to server crashes and I cursed up and down but... You just had some bad luck is all. But they are trying it seems, there have been some -major- improvements. Hop on one of the new servers and check out the great difference. Like go on Andorhal and roll your forsaken rogue, you'll notice a vast difference.

As far as the level grind...

Getting two (working on a third) to 60, isn't all that bad. Like.. okay your first character to 60 is a complete pain because everything is all new. Anything after that, I mean you learn that you can do say... this bundle of quests together because they're all in the same area, there's a level, then you can go into that instance and get like 10 quests for that instance (Blackrock Depths is a wonderful place to grind out the last few levels) and gain about 2 more levels and so on. It goes relatively quick when you're in good company and it becomes painless. Some of the quest chains as well are actually interesting to follow and read, storyline wise. You also learn which quests and instances will give you the best rewards/drops for your class and level and its just... there is soooo much.

If you find yourself on Andorhal, just to check out the constrast of how nice one of Blizz's servers can actually be, my undead warlock's name is Mags, stick her on your friends list.

[ElPresidente]

I'm running off Oceanic servers due to lag which is why I'm on Frostmourne, admittedly with only 3 servers servicing the region there is going to be a lot of demand across all three.

Nonetheless no other MMO experiences this problem and the popularity of WoW means that combating the issue is easier not more difficult. More games sold = large margin once off revenue, More subscriptions sold = more repeat revenue... Blizzard make a lot of money off this game.

CCP has one of the world's top ten super computer arrays to support EVE, Blizzard does not. Why not? They are a bigger, more successful company... they are trying but not hard enough. Considering the technical restraints of what they work with is no harder than other MMOs (and in the case of CCP less demanding as CCP host all their subscribers on the one mega server with 25,000 people online at once at last count and that is with plenty of server headroom left).

Basically you plan in anticipation of demand... that is how CCP and others are not experiencing the issues of WoW. Blizzard are planning in response to demand and that is a model that hurts the consumer.

As for the game I'm having a much more enjoyable experience this time around. I think it is a tastes changing thing.

Ascarn hit level 12 today. Huzzah. ;)

[Annuta]

I've been playing WoW for over a year now.

Main
Name: Kalinochka
Class: Priest
Gender: Female
Race: Night Elf
Level: 60
Realm: Garona (normal)
Professions: Herbalism/Alchemy (both 300)
Guild: Ordo Seclorum (So far we've cleared BWL, MC, Ony, ZG, AQ20 and up to Princess Huhuran in AQ40)

Alt
Name: Azazella
Class: Warlock
Gender: Female
Race: Human
Level: 60
Realm: Garona (normal)
Professions: Enchanting/Tailoring (both 300)
Guild: Ordo Seclorum (same as main)