Intro

So for a long time now, I’ve been wanted to enjoy the full experience of World of Warcraft. Before I moved to NYC and before I got married, I gave it a go and for some reason the experience didn’t stick to me. I ended up creating a bunch of characters on different servers trying to get a good experience but ended up dropping WoW and carelessly defining it a “time waster”, with the idea that dropping the game was something that was beneficial to me as I can spend the time with other productive activities. This left me with some level 19 characters on a couple of different servers that act as my illegitimate gaming children. Signs of a previous gaming life when I was single and willing to try on different games on a whim. (I know lvl 19 is wuss-style, but I’ll get to that later.)

But things are different now. Being married, I need to carefully choose my games and the times at which I can let loose. I can no longer carelessly spend 10+ hours on raids and quests leveling up my character. And I know what you’re saying, “Sam, you know, if you can get your wife to play WoW, you can spend that time together.” Sure, I can try convincing my wife to play WoW, but you have to understand that that’s like trying to convince Tom Cruise to take an Advil. Near impossible. For games, my wife has an attention span of less than 30 mins. And that’s for games like Guitar Hero. And of course this is in no way dissing the fact that my wife is not a gamer. I infact appreciate that she’s not a gamer. I think we would both be in a very bad place if she was a gamer, because that would unleash the gaming beast within me. So you can say that she’s the equivalent of garlic juice that Blade injects into himself to prevent him from going balls-out VamPYREiStical.

WoW? Huh?

So why WoW? And why now? Both very good questions. I did have a chance in 2004 to be completely nut-sacked about WoW. But why didn’t I? I think it was a combination of things. The timing opportunity was there. I had a pretty chill job in Louisville and being single allowed me to spend A LOT of time with games. And I did. But I was into City of Heroes at the time. And that was my first love with a MMORPG; and like a first love, you tried to stick with it. But then WoW dropped and everyone was raving about it, so I decided to make the jump. I bought a copy of WoW installed it and gave it a go. But the people weren’t friendly. Forming a group for quests seemed a bit sterile and I never “grooved” with the other members of the party. I certainly might have been biased because of CoH, but I half-expected things to be FANTASTIC for WoW. Then I tried again on a different server because I thought “well maybe the people on this server are just a bunch of cock gobblers”, but NYET. Same experience on two different servers. Grouping never came naturally, people were dicks, and the game eventually felt better as solo play. I even reconfirmed the “friendliness” aspect by creating a new character on City of Heroes and I was amazed to find how people just got along better in groups.

Now why do I want to go back and experience that again? Firstly, I feel like I never got the whole World of Warcraft experience. People that know me, know that I can be pretty nutso about certain things. Games are one of them. The fact that I was never nutso about WoW has been bothering me ever since the first attempt. The fact that it has over 10 million subscribed user tells me that it’s an amazing game. And that’s something that I want to experience. It’s arguably one of the BEST games EVAR and to miss out on something like that is unacceptable to me.

The Rub

BUT!!!1111 Now here’s essentially the catch of this entire post. I think it’s pretty unrealistic for me to be spending 4+ hours a day playing WoW. I would most probably have to cut corners in my job, my responsibilities at home and my QT™ with my wife. That’s a no-no for me. Not because I’m bitch-whipped or anything, I simply do not think that’s responsible for me these days. OK, maybe just a little whipped. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Shut up.

1 Hour a Day

So I started an experiment over the weekend. I downloaded and installed WoW with the Burning Crusade(took a fricking day) and created a new character. The main part of the experiment is to try and limit my WoW gaming to about 1 hour a day, and to see if I get a full and rich WoW experience. Of course the 1 hour a day won’t allow me to do raids which is easily a 10+ hour affair. But I’m giving myself the opportunities for such time allotment for vacations and random chances; much like any 10+ hour gaming sessions I have these days if/when I have a chance to have them. One example would be on a night that my friends are over, drink and play games until 5AM. The point of this is that if WoW is truly a well made game, I should get a full experience from my 1 hour a day experiment.

I will be updating this blog with updates on my Horde character Shinzou on Gul’Dan server. If you see me, say “hi”.

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