Shock

Something has happened that I honestly didn’t figure ever would.  I have been talked into playing World of Warcraft. 

To be more accurate, I’m using a 10-day free trial at Tompall’s behest.  I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, mostly because I don’t want to start paying that monthly fee at the end of the trial.  Tompall has gone so far as to offer to pay for my first month just to get me to keep playing with him beyond ten days, but I’m not sure if I really want to do that yet.  For one thing, the ol’ lappy here can’t run the thing, so I’ve been using the newer one Dad bought off a guy at the flea market.  I don’t believe I’ve really mentioned that– I think he paid about $200 for a machine that would have cost about $800 at the time.  Before he did much with it I insisted I be allowed to give it the once-over.  It was owned by a young man, after all, and I saw no sense in leaving anything a young man might have on it.  I was right too– there was a file about 2G labeled "Beasty."  I didn’t actually open the folder, but the thumbnails I could see were certainly full of nudity, and if the label was "Beasty," there’s no telling what else was going on in there. 

Anyway, since I have to go borrow that laptop every time I want to play WoW, I feel bad about doing it for some reason.  And to be completely honest, I enjoy the opportunity to play online with a friend who’s far away (still sad I couldn’t get FFXI going on the 360 before it died just for that reason) but for my part, there’s just too much to keep up with in an MMO.  Then there’s the fact that when I am playing with somebody who’s already very familiar with the game, I wind up feeling like a sidekick, running blindly after somebody who’s completely sure where they’re going when I have no clue, and who can never seem to come up with a good answer when I ask, "Okay, so how, if I was alone and not with somebody who could guide me, could I possibly find what I’m looking for?  Is there some sort of marker I’m not seeing?"  The best answers I got were, "See the minimap in the corner? Okay, let’s go!" and, "Well, if you actually read the information you get when you accept a quest, it sort of tells you where to go."  The latter came moments before impatiently running off saying, "You took that quest right?  Take EVERY SINGLE quest you can so you level up as fast as possible!"  which of course gave me zero time to actually read the information they just told me to read.  Just to clarify, that came from some random person that Tompall has played with before who joined our group.  Ask me if I ever actually fucking killed anything.  Go ahead, ask.  No.  Any experience I got from battle was only because I happened to be in a party with a couple of much higher-level characters who ran about slaughtering all the monsters in the vicinity, then turning and insisting that I loot the corpses.  So yeah, when you look at it that way, all I get when I play WoW is frustrated.  I did get the opportunity to play alone yesterday, since I happened to get on when Tompall was not (and again, I don’t mean to convey that I don’t want to play with my good friend– I really do), and it was still frustrating.  I kept dying.  I know that’s all part of it, but I have a big problem with dying.  Besides the obvious stigma of failure, there’s the fact that you have to run around as a ghost and locate your body, which is, of course, where you left it, i.e. right next to the group of asshole monsters that killed it in the first place!  Or you can allow the "spirit of healing" to resurrect you, which penalizes you by damaging all your equipment. 

It certainly sounds like I don’t enjoy WoW.  I’m still undecided at this point, but whether I like it or not I still don’t want to commit to it, so the point is moot.