Day 66: World of What the What?

 
It was on a whim that my best friend Brandon and I decided to give World of Warcraft a try. With a free 15 day trial it only seemed natural to install it; the only investment was the time downloading and the precious hard drive space it would take up. Neither of us were big into MMO's (Massive Multiplayer Online games). We played Final Fantasy Online a bit when that came out on the Xbox and also messed around with a few free-to-play MMO's on the PC, but we definitely weren't MMO players.

After installing the game, Brandon and I got on our headsets and started the journey of creating our virtual avatars. Right off the bat we were met with the quandary of choosing a faction. There were two of them to pick from. There was the Alliance, which were the "good" guys. Their various races consisted of Elves, Dwarfs, Gnomes, and Humans. You know the standard good-guy fantasy thoroughfare. On the flip side there was The Horde, which was comprised of Orcs, Trolls, The Undead, and giant Minotaur creatures called Tauren. 

Neither of us knew anything at all about the game going into it, so we just took a blind stab and decided to go with The Alliance. Why not? Out of all of the choices of race and class we both decided to take on the roles of Elf Hunters. The next decision was that of a server. The server is basically where your character "lives" and there are different types of servers depending on the way that you want to play. Once again, knowing nothing about MMO's, we chose a PVP server. PVP means player versus player. We didn't know it yet, but that was one of our first major mistakes.

Soon after making our fateful choices, we were thrust into a world we knew hardly anything about. A quick introduction cut scene played, giving a brief overview about the race of elves and the war between The Alliance and The Horde. After that was finished, the controls were handed over to us. All MMO's have a starting area (or zone) which is designed to acclimate the player to the controls and game mechanics by participating in and completing menial tasks. Being veteran gamers, that part seemed pretty straight forward so we ventured on.

Once you've learned all of the basics and completed several quests, then it's time to leave the safety of the starting zone and travel to the mainland where anything goes. There the game no longer holds your hand and the only thing keeping you from dying a horrible and embarrassing newbie's death, is your wits and also how fast you can run. We boarded a large ship that pulled up to the dock of the Elven Kingdom and began the voyage to the mainland. 

After a quick loading screen we found ourselves in a place aptly dubbed "Darkshore". It was a very different looking place from the colorful and vibrant forests of the Elven homeland we left behind. It was dark, muddy, and drab as we explored the little town there. We picked up some quests in the town and started working on them. We saw very few other people and most of them were as low level as us and also looked as about lost as we did. We figured out how to chat with other people and even had one guy who did a few quests with us. 

We finished completing a difficult quest and were walking on the road back into town to when we saw something huge stomping down the path toward us. It was one of the aforementioned Taurens, and compared to us he was huge. We were probably level 10 or so and above his name we saw that he was a whopping level 50. I quoted a line from The Fellowship of the Ring (you know which one) and then we scrambled off the road and behind some trees, hoping that he hadn't seen us. We stood still and tried to peek out to see if the minotaur had altered his course. Nothing. We found ourselves whispering to each other, even though there was no way that he could hear us through our headsets. 

Finally he appeared right behind us, making us both yell in surprise. He stood over us, with massive his gleaming armor and a two-handed sword that was bigger than both of us. He had invariably spent hours upon hours attaining his epic protective coating and gargantuan weapon. There was one swift strike and Brandon's character fell dead to the ground, then another slash and my elf hit the forest floor in the same manner. What happened next was a nerd-rage inducing series of unfortunate events. When your character dies in World of Warcraft you turn into a little blue wisp of a ghost and you can either be resurrected by another player, or you're forced to go to a graveyard and come back to life there. 

We went to the nearby graveyard and resurrected only to find that the Tauren was right there waiting for us. He knew exactly where we would be. In two more slashes we were transformed into ghosts once more. This happened over and over and over. That was when we learned about the word "gank" and what it meant, because that's exactly what was happening to us. We were getting ganked. That was until, the oversize cow decided that he had had his fun and left us and disappeared into the forest. We had unwittingly joined a sever that was home to mostly high level players and to top it off, it was a player versus player realm which meant that it was open season 24/7 for noobs like us.

After getting ganked, Brandon and I decided that we needed to buy some better weapons and gear to defend ourselves. Up until that point we were using staffs and bows. Not really the greatest weapons when facing dangerous foes and forest creatures like bears and mountain lions. What we both really needed and wanted were some nice long swords. They had them for sale in the town and we bought them, but unfortunately they required weapon training in order to use them. So I grabbed the first person I saw in town and started chatting with them to find out where we could go get training. He was a much higher level and seemed very knowledgeable about the game. He told me that there was a place on this continent called "Orgrimmar" where we could go get sword training. He left us and we prepared for an epic quest to a distant city, in order to be trained in the ways of the blade.

To be continued...