Hey. I’m back. Remember me?
Sorry guys. It’s been a rough and tumultuous year. I took several months completely “off” (with my subscription stopped) and other months where it would be lucky for me to login 2-3 times a month. It wasn’t a financial thing or an “I’m sick of the game” thing. It was just that there was a lot going on in my life and I didn’t have a lot of time. (Well ok, I was a little fed up with the instance problem a year ago (see previous post), but that’s not the reason I left…)
I’ve been playing again (on Bloodhoof) for about a month and with a wonderful sidekick. I’m hoping I can lure her into writing a blurb here every once in a while. We are milking the living daylights out of the Refer-A-Friend program. In the space of a month she has about five or six toons, the “big one” is a level 53 priest, and I don’t think any of them are lower than 20. “Alastrine” (the name of her priest) is rapidly learning the ropes and is turning into quite the WoW expert in a very short period of time. (Last time I checked, she had more money on her main toon than I have on all of mine.)
So mostly I’ve wiped a bunch of old toons I didn’t use (mostly storage/bank alts) so I could make new toons to play with Alastrine’s new toons and the experience with Refer-A-Friend has been insane. The levels come so fast that it’s almost impossible to keep yourself in “current” gear because after you play for an hour or two the gear is out of date. (Plus, even when she’s up at 3am in insomniac mode, she grants me the levels I slept through. Win-win.)
My one major beef with the Refer-A-Friend program is the new reward. I don’t think it was very well thought out. They are giving you a two-person flying mount usable in Outlands. Great. But if they’re going to reward you for recruiting a new player to the game, why wouldn’t they give you a land mount that you can use while you help level the younger character.
Cataclysm? Yeah, sure. But both of the computers we’re using here are kind of old and/or underpowered and I really don’t want to see the system requirements jump again. It seems to me (I could be wrong) that my Mac Mini barely passed the system requirements check for Wrath last time. Oh well. We will cross our fingers and see. A friend of mine just built a computer for about a grand Canadian that clocks at 200 fps. It’s sick and disgusting and I hate him. And I want one. Playing on a machine with that kind of horsepower is ridiculous. I saw accents and features in zones I had never noticed before. And I’ve been playing almost since beta.
It’s really kind of fun playing with somebody who is totally, legitimately new. (Those are so few and far between these days.) It really helps you see the awe and wonder of the game. A few days ago we were in the Zoram Strand questing and she decided it would be faster to swim to Astranaar. I went along with it, not really thinking but the long and the short of it was we ended up swimming all the way to Desolace before finding a place we could get back on-shore. To our credit we only died once in the run from Tethris Aran to Nigel’s Point. (I’m still shaking my head that we didn’t get nailed by any of those Naga swimming around in the water.)
But when it was done we’d had a good time, escaped death a half dozen times, and seen part of the “vanilla” world that Alastrine hadn’t seen before. In my books that’s a win more than a raid drop, a moronically high gear score, or a list of fulfilled end-game achievements.
After some consideration, I think we’ve decided to bring Council Of The Sword back to life. It had pretty much fizzled out and I was leery about putting the effort into it to bring it back to life. We tried another guild but it didn’t really work for us. So if you’re looking for a place to hang around and quest and “do what you want to do” without a lot of expectations, drop me a note either by e-mail or in-game to one of my alts.
That’s it for now. Look forward to me posting more regularly. I’ve been meaning to get back to this blog for weeks. Sorry for the chatty “all-over-the-road” post.
The Life Of A Rogue Named Gweedo 