Shopping and upgrading (friday)

This post should've been made on friday (but I got too caught up in other social/work matters).

Basically on this day I met up with one of my buddies from the class, Phil, and he just talked to me how we could group, share items and go about fighting together. I was too concentrated on finishing up some other tasks in the initial world of the undead so I told him I'd meet him later at the second town.

I'm my way to the mines, I got lost and ventured way beyond the boundaries of my level. Needless to say I got my ass handed to me by some powerful enemies (who for no reason attacked me) and ended up dying twice (and I learned that not all clustered houses necesarrily represent a town or a safe haven). I decided to resurrect from the grave of the second town but I was still a few levels too low to participate in any quests there.

I went back to the first town to finish my errands and got myself acquainted with pawning a few items and getting new weapons and armor - I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of this MMORPG thing (at this point it feels like a normal RPG).

After getting a few missions done I was finally sent to the second town (Remol I think) to start doing some chores there. One thing let to another and I found myself in dire need of some level upgrading, but I was finally having some wholesome fun and I'm excited about what else I can find in this World of Warcraft.

One nice thing about my whole adventuring that day was that I caught the attention of one of my coworkers and she wanted to get in on the adventure (working for a videogame company has it's perks). Might as well convert the entire company to Warcraft fellows :P

humbly finished one quest

I didn't do much today. I felt very sick and slept most of the afternoon to recover a bit. I decided to just wrap up the mission to get wings and fangs for the mistress that heals other undead in town. I got my item pouch full so that hinted me that I could now sell my items for gold and cash in on some weapons.

I guess I'll do some of that tomorrow, shopping.

New character

So today I tried out a suggestion by one of my friends. Get together and form a team on World of Warcraft, but by creating a new character in one place.

We agreed upon the Undead. So I went out and made my new character, an undead warrior, called Azrhaeljp (just now I think I got the spelling wrong, as I meant to name myself after the Angel of Death, plus my initials).

I leveled up a bit and tried to complete a few quests (having been used to the whole initiation with the night elf character) and it was fun to play in this new setting. I played the quests for about an hour before I got to a new one which seems difficult...bats and other flying creatures don't let themselves get hit easily.

I noticed the effects of a bottlenecked connection with this new character. Everything was slow, even picking up items from dead enemies was slow. I'm starting to get hints about the underlying rules of the client-server structure. The game is starting to get interesting from a Computer Engineer's point of view.

Much later my friends added me and I was waiting for one of them to spawn from the grave...but that was just before class started and I also noticed I have a trojan running somewhere in my laptop.

(lucky for me I have this installed on my work computer)

Getting to know my surroundings

Today I didn't get to do very much. I did a lot of walking since my objective was to read a sygil (scroll I guess) and find a wise warrior trainer somewhere. While I was searching for said trainer, I killed a rabbit, a frog, went swimming (or tried to) and got myself killed from a great height.

Death is an unusual thing in this game. You seem to wake up as a spirit form and you have to find your body, wherever you left it. Fortunately I remembered I died somewhere around the trunk of the great big tree in the village and found my body rather quickly. I was mesmerized by this alternate form of existence...I wonder if I could've done more as a ghost. I guess I'll have to die more often to find out.

I eventually found this trainer and got 40 extra experience points and then I went on to a new objective, looking to gather the venom of some spiders. Alas I could not find them and so I decided to leave the game at that point. Till next time.

Back to adventuring

Recapping, my quest was to find evidence of evil growth in the forest. I had to find some mushroom like things (musgovil if I remember well) and show them to a Centaur called Tarindrella.

Upon resuming the game I found a small settlement of nasty looking imps (I'm supposing these were the creatures that were turning evil due to the effects of the shrooms). They were called Grellin and I saw mushrooms around their area and thought I had to pick them up but I couldn't.

At this time I gave up again on the quest and later resumed in the middle of class. It had ocurred to me that if I was in the right place then...where else could I get these musgovil shrooms? My mind reasoned "if you can't pick up the weed, then take it off any junkie". So I killed one of these Grellin and, as suspected, he had some musgovil on him. I went on a Grellin killing spree and got the 8 musgovils I needed to give back to Tarindrella. I learned a few new things about the gameplay, mostly picking up items and equipping boots.

Unfortunately that was all I could do for one day of play (and I've lost 2 or 3 days) so for today I guess this is it :(

First impression

I usually don't play mmorpg's (Final Fantasy XI is still burning a hole in my pocket) so I was very skeptical about starting world of warcraft, even after installing it and adjusting graphics settings.

First thing that caught me eye was the fact that, when you edit your character, you can choose how detailed you want to edit him (take the basic layout and change it mildly or change everything). I always had the nasty habit of seeing how far I could go in these editors, but seeing as it went really deep into details, I stopped at a point where the character just resembled me somewhat.

A lot of people tell me to RTFM, but years of experience in playing good games has shown me that an intuitive interface and very helpful characters in an RPG can help you master the menus rather easily. So far that does happen in WoW. I chose the night elf as my race so the basic premise was that I had to start out balancing the population of certain fauna in the forest.

Fighting:

Not unlike Final Fantasy XI, you select an enemy and choose an action from the action bar below on the screen. I found out that if you tap the secondary mouse button again, it will automatically choose attack for you (or, I take it, the most appropriate action to perform on a given object). I then went on to kill this animal, one out of 4 boars and 4 sabertooth 'something' (it was in spanish as sable). The fight sequence played out automatically. I still don't know if you can distance yourself to avoid hits or not but the character seems to randomly dodge hits.

Spoils:

Right about after the second sabretooth I killed, I noticed his body has not disappeared and was glowing, so I went to investigate. Seems that you have to pick up the spoils by yourself...I thought they had this standardized in the RPG world :(

I finished my first quest and got a prize...first inroad into WoW, woopee!!

Things started to get more complicated with the next quest and so I left it here. Stay tuned for the next journal entry...finding shrooms (or that's what I think forest-like drugs look like).