The 20 Days of World of Warcraft: Day Nineteen

How many hours do you play a week, roughly?  


The number of hours per week that I play has varied over my WoW career. Currently, I pretty much only play on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays (my days off of work). I'm not sure I could clearly estimate how much time I spend playing on those days. Afterall, this here blog takes up a good portion of my free time as well, and is often done interspersed into my WoW time. Can I include blog time in my /played since it is WoW related? Hehe.


Rough estimate, I'd say I spend about 20-25 hours per week actually playing the game. Bump it up to 30-35 hours if we include my blogging time. I don't think this is unreasonable. Some other people would say I'm obsessed and addicted and whatever other stupid labels there might be. To those people I say, "What if I took away your television?" Tell me you're not "addicted" to TV, then we'll talk.

Random Six

I took inspiration from Pilfkin at Moar Alts! and started my very own "Project 10." Except there aren't 10, and I'm sure I didn't set it up the same way she did. I have 6, that way I don't have to try and dig out my D&D dice set. I haven't the foggiest where I put them, in fact, its entirely possible the ex took them and my rule books in the split. Wow... got a lil off topic. Ermm... yes.

So, six toons, the first of which is my paladin, Audrid, whom you all have met already. I'll be introducing them individually over the next days, and one of them even adds an interesting new twist to your normal way of leveling.

Admittedly, I am not doing one of each class, even though eventually maybe I would like to have one of each. And I'm definitely not doing much cross-faction, only one of them is Horde. It seemed like a good way to get me playing and making the toons I've always wanted to have.

Thanks a million for the inspiration, Pilf!

The 20 Days of World of Warcraft: Day Eighteen

Post your favorite Screenshot.

Oh gosh! You're going to make me choose one favorite? Nuh uh. Isn't going to happen.

So here they are, in no particular order:

The Love Picture

Steam Punk Draenei (or Space Pirate, Ashelyth is too sexy for her goggles)

Background - Dryad in Ashenvale (Pre-Shattering)

Harder than Vanilla

WARNING: Rambling and disjointed rant incoming.

I got into an argument the other day with one of my co-worker/friends who also plays WoW. He is quitting WoW and insists that players are making a mass exodus because of the difficulty of Cataclysm raids. He claims that he's been raiding since Vanilla, and these are the hardest dungeons he has ever seen. He insists that only the most hardcore of elite guilds are getting any bosses killed. He claims that its not fair if one person's mistake causes the raid to wipe.

I can't really argue with any of it because I am not personally raiding at this time, although I have friends that are, but the whole conversation really ticked me off. I'm sorry, but even if raids are "too hard" right now, we haven't even seen a real patch yet (well, up until yesterday).

Comparing Cataclysm to Vanilla is like comparing apples and oranges, yeah, they're both fruit, but...

I highly doubt that my friends' guilds can be considered "the most hardcore of elite," afterall, I am on the Cairne realm. We're notorious for being low on the PVE charts, yet many of these guilds are at 7 or 8 bosses down.

As far as one person causing wipes... uhh... hello? Lich King Defile anyone? Seriously? Can't remember that? It really wasn't that long ago. And this was certainly not the only situation where one person's mistake could cause wipes. Remember Flamewreath on Shade of Aran? Remember Solarian's Wrath of the Astromancer?

I find it hard to believe that raiding is so hard that people are quitting in droves. If that was the case we would have either seen a massive nerfbat taken to the instances or a massive boost to player talents/skills by now. Blizzard would not sit idly by if the game was so unplayable.

There is a fine line to walk between making the gameplay too easy at endgame and making it too difficult. Maybe its because I am a BC baby, but I think the raiding difficulty in BC was just about the right balance. If current raiding is anything like that was, then I'd say things are just about right.

Being a blogger, I see people come and go all the time for various reasons. The reasons I see more often are not because of the difficulty of raid content, although I'm sure some people do quit for that reason. If I were to quit the game, it certainly would not be because of the difficulty of raids.

Honestly, I find it very telling that when things get hard this particular individual gives up. It speaks volumes about his character. Then again, who am I to judge what he does during his free time. This feels like yet another instance of rage quit. No one does the quitting thing quite like a WoW player does.

I can't sit here and say that I think WoW is the best game ever made and that it will never jump the shark, but I don't think it has yet. At least it hasn't for me.

The 20 Days of World of Warcraft: Day Seventeen

What do you do when the server is down?


A fitting topic for the day. Well, since maintenance day is typically Tuesday and  I typically have Tuesdays off of work, I pick Tuesday for my chore day. I run errands, clean up the house a bit, whatever needs doing. If I really run out of things to do, I catch up on my blog reading/writing. And then, if I still have time to spare, I'll either watch some TV or pick up an F2P game to putz around with until servers come back up.

Totally boring, I know, but there you have it.