My war(craft) journal #1

Seeing as for reasons mentioned before I don’t really tend to write much about my life (as I don’t want to get fired from my job/my girlfriend's privacy/but mainly the fact that its really really b-o-r-i-n-g), I figured I might try an alternative kind of diary.
Recently I've taken the plunge and signed up to play "world of Warcraft" online.
WoW (as I’m now going to refer to it as its too much to be typing each time) is a totally online role player game where you play together with (or against) thousands of other ner...I mean players. Its a more involved type of game than say Quake/C.S as you play on the same server with the same people all the time, plus your character becomes more experienced the more you play allowing you greater powers, so the type of game you play after say 2 months will be different than the one you started with.
Just as an exercise I'm going to try and document some of the stuff I do, and how I progress. I promise If I find myself writing about any beardy goblin bashing and useless stats I'll delete the lot straight away ...honest*
First up here’s me in the game:

-see I'm waving!

A bit of background, Warcraft* was originally a vaguely tolkienesq war strategy game, pitting human and orc armies against each other. Sequels added other races and a fairly in-depth story line.W.O.W is very different from the earlier Warcraft games in that you only control one character (as opposed to a whole army) and get to see the Warcraft universe from a very different angle.

Warcraft III
I'd avoided 3D online rpgs up until now as I'd got completely hooked on their primitive text based predecessors(MUDS) when I was in college, to the point where I was spending 8+ hours a day playing them. But I figured that I'm a lot older and a bit wiser so I should be able to show restraint now. I'd seen it getting dome good previews of WoW from a few of the better PC mags , and the guys that run penny arcade seem to like it , so that’s good enough for me. To round things off a mate of mine, Lex had bought it on the day of release and promised to help me out in game so that sealed the deal.
On installing the game (4 disks! 3.1gb!)And finding my authentication key (tucked behind one of the cds), I was ready to register my account details and start playing.
Except I couldn’t.
Due to the fact I'd picked the weekend that 250,000 new copies of WOW had been issued to shops to start playing, I couldn’t connect to the web server to register, as it was well, broken due to the vast amounts of new users .I'm going to gloss over the wait here, but some long hours later I was allowed the privilege of giving them my credit card details.

So now I'm ready to create my online character, my avatar, my alter ego .
I chose the name Luas ,(nothing to do with trams honestly)as amonst other things its easy to type ..(the keyboard still has some use in the game and you dont want to have to type things like' /heal bhrian de'bloodaxe' in a pinch now do you?)
I'd decided to go for the "bad" faction 'the horde' (as opposed to the federation styled human "alliance") as my friend Lex was planning on playing as them..After dallying for a while with the idea of picking a member of the undead race to play as, I decided to go with the tauren, who are big (and I mean BIG!! 7-8ft in height) and Minotaur like. Whether this was because I favoured their strength and look, or because I was compensating for being a bit of a short arse in real life I'm not sure. You have a choice of different classes to pick from as well depending on what you fancy doing in the game, whether it be helping other players/dealing damage/casting spells etc. I chose the druid profession as you can do a bit of everything with that
For technical reasons there are 20 or 30 different WoW different EU servers to create characters on, .I guess you could think of them as "alternate realities" .I chose one called "frostwhisper" as it wasnt stuffed to the gills with players like some other servers, I liked the name and ,well, because the game recommended it!

So a few minutes later I’m "standing" in a grassland plain surrounded by Native American style Tepees ready to do battle. I give my mate Lex a shout in game (As he's created a character there too) and ask him to meet me. Which he sets about doing, although because he's "geographically” about a hundred odd miles away in the game, this ends up taking about 2 days.
Ok that’s all for now, next up I'll be talking about the first couple of days, the people I played alongside, the skills I learned and mostly how I died ...a lot.

*the warcraft games are around 10+ years now which is the tenuous link I'm using to be able to write about this in a "retro" blog...yeah, very tenuous I know