Monday, February 26, 2007

This Is Why I Don't Gamble

Thursday - Buy World of Warcraft (basic game, no expansion). Spend two full hours getting it installed/updated. Five minutes into the game I no longer care. Play for about an hour, figure out the basics of the interface. I'm a gnome rogue, btw. Apparently not a great choice if you want to join a lot of groups (and I'm a bit surprised that I've been invited to so many), but I'm more interested in getting to know the game on my own.

Friday - Play for about 90 minutes. Pretty much exhaust all of the quests in Coldridge Valley, I think I'm around 4th level by this time, which seems to have gone pretty quickly. Ran into my first "challenging" quest in killing trolls in the cave.

Saturday - Play for about two hours. Move into Dun Morgain (or whatever it's called). Get used to the area in that time, do a few quests, hit level 6 after killing a lot of critters.

Sunday - Play for about 2.5 hours. Trolls in this area are a lot tougher to kill. I figure out that I can get Shimmerweek up on Shimmer Ridge by camping, going into stealth mode, then poaching from the troll baskets while the other players in the area fight the trolls. i decide some time later that maybe this was on the rude side, but hey, I'm a rogue. I also spend a *lot* of time dying in the troll cave in the area, at one point I have to wait about 15 minutes for some more players to come into the cave and kill some of the 12 (really) trolls that are roaming unmolested around my corpse. Make a really dumb decision to exit the game in the cave when I realize I have to go to a choir concert in 40 minutes and I haven't showered yet.

Sunday evening - read parts of the manual, so some online reading while Mel watches Grey's Anatomy. Fall asleep thinking of how to kill that last troll headhunter to complete my quest and avoid dying for the 90th time in that dumbass cave. BTW, I'm really bad at sneaking up on monsters, they always turn around when I get just a smidge too close.

Monday - Play for about 2 hours, maybe a bit less. Finish the headhunter quest, learn to cook, spend a little time looking for copper to mine but just end up getting killed by animals who wander by and I have to spend a very long time remembering how to get to using a dagger instead of my pickaxe. Take a cask of ale up to Loc Morgan, take a keg to delive into the area, but decide to head for Ironforge to deliver a map of the troll cave. Wow, Ironforge is cool. Wow, this game is taking over my life. My wife asks me how I'm doing on limiting my playing time, I mumble something about that I'm doing quite well but privately have to think for a minute as to when I actually started. Amazingly, I *do* stop when I tell myself I will, but mostly because it's dinner time. Finish at 8th level, starting to work on my various skills (especially mining and cooking, engineering just seems to happen for some reason). Oh, and I start learning first aid.

Monday evening - Think about how Mel will be at work much of the next day and how I can get in a good four hours of play and go looking for mechanical parts amongst the leper gnomes. Consider joining a 12-step program but decide it would cut into my playing time. Wonder how long before Mel insists on a one-hour-per-day limit (my entry in the betting pool is this time next week). Think about what I'll do tomorrow in the game.

I am in serious trouble.

2 comments:

dave said...

Well, that was entirely predictable!

The good thing about City of Heroes/Villians is that it keeps me from spending money on buying new video games. I play about 15 hours a week; more than that, and I burn out.

Laurent said...

Welcome to Wow-addiction Doug.
Let me know on what server you play.