Tonight was a strange night in Azeroth.
Every Tuesday night, I have a “date” with a couple of friends that I actually know in the real world (although which world is real and which is virtual is a topic for another day) and we do whatever, group quests, instances, achievements, etc. They usually rely on me to figure out what adventures we’re going to go on and to fill up the group if needed and some nights it’s frustrating because they are very limited in their capabilities gamewise. I love them to death, but they are horrible at playing their toons. I’ve tried to point them to resources where they can learn and people in game they can talk to for advice, but none of it seems to get through to them. And they know they aren’t that good, but they don’t try to get better and that’s what drives me crazy. But they have to get out of the game what they want to get out of it, since it’s their $30/mo (for the 2 of them) and if they’re not willing to put in the effort, it’s not really my problem except that we’re limited because we can’t run anything more difficult that heroic gundrak, which is what we did last week and it took all night. Fortunately, I have several good friends that don’t mind running with them and we usually have a great time, so that’s what really counts. But to get back to tonight…
I was hanging out waiting for my friends to be ready this eve. I had our event planned since it’s the Pilgrim’s Bounty Holiday event and my friend had been hinting all week that he wanted to work on an achievement that required us to go into the enemy’s home cities and sit at their tables while dressed in Pilgrim attire. Since they weren’t ready yet, I was doing some easy quests for my eventual Loremaster Title and chatting with some guild mates when I got a whisper from someone I knew back in my old guild. He had switched servers and was looking to maybe come back to ours and was checking out to see if any of his old friends were around. He asked me about some of our mutual friends, most of whom are still around and members of my current guild, so I tried to fill him in the best that I could, but at the time, I was really the only one available from the people he was looking for.
So then I went on my adventure with my friends after we grabbed a few more folks from the guild. I hate anything that has to do with pvp so I wasn’t looking forward to getting flagged and potentially killed, but I wanted to get the achievement, so off we went. Fortunately one of my group mates had already scouted out the locations so it ended up being pretty easy and we really only had one encounter with the opposite faction in UC and we actually won. Afterwards, my friends & I decided to do another Pilgrim’s Bounty achievement that required us to do an instance in OL. I was going to do it in heroic to make things interesting but my friends didn’t have the key, so we went through it in regular after grabbing a couple different people from the guild other than the one’s that went with us for other achievement since they had already done the instance. That actually was pretty easy…I could have probably soloed it myself anyway, but it was more fun to do it with a group.
So, then my “date” was over so I decided to go work on my Loremaster again…I’ll be working on that for a LONG time, as I only have 200 out of the 700 quests that I need done for Kalimdor. I did get the Eastern Kingdoms one done a few days ago though!
While I was questing, I got asked to heal a heroic by another friend that I met in my old guild and was briefly in my current guild but who’s now in a different guild mainly because he wanted to raid later than our raids were scheduled. Anyway, we’ve been grouping up a lot lately for some PUGs and he wanted to do today’s daily, which was Gundrak, and possibly get some achievements which we tried for last week and didn’t get. However, before the group finished getting put together, he had to go, so that ended up being a no go. During this time, I also got a whisper from a low level druid that I had helped last night while working on my Loremaster quests in Teladrassil. She wanted to know how to get to SW from Darnassus, so I told her about the boats.
After I finished the last of my quests in Teladrassil, I was cleaning out my packs in Darnassus and chatting with one of my good guild friends who’s also working on the Loremaster but is way ahead of me, having finished Kalimdor last night and is now cleaning up the Outland portion. I was just about to log off for the night because I stayed up late last night to be able to gratz him when he got the achievement, but then I got another whisper from a random stranger asking for gold, to which I said no…Like I’m just going to hand a strange level 44 hunter some of my hard earned cash for no reason.
And then I got another whisper from a random person saying that they didn’t know me but he needed to pass on a message from someone claiming to be a friend who had stopped playing several months ago. This friend wanted me to add him to my friend’s list so that I could speak to him. This was a new one to me, but I also loaned a lot of gold to this person before he stopped playing (about 5k gold) so that he could level his enchanting. I doubted I’d ever see the money back anyway before I even agreed to lend it to him, so it’s not that big of a deal to me (although it would be nice to get it back), but I wanted to find out what happened. So I whispered this level 6 night elf hunter who said he’d been trying to find me in Teladrassil for quite a while but apparently he couldn’t get my attention. I established that it was him but he didn’t have the money for a game card, so he was on a trial account and that’s why he couldn’t whisper me without being on my friend’s list. We caught up a bit, but I didn’t ask him about my gold. He said he was going to try to get a game card so he could play his regular toons again, although he was afraid his gf might get mad about the time he’d spend in the game, although she plays a lot of Zelda, so he thought he could play this while she played Zelda if she wasn’t willing to play WoW with him. His other rl friend who got him into the game is currently in boot camp, so he wouldn’t be around for a while, but he said he missed the social aspect of the game and Zelda wasn’t quite cutting it for him.
So this long narrative brings me to the point of my post. For me, it’s the socialization aspect of WoW that brings me back every day for hours on end. I enjoy the questing and running instances and raiding and working on achievements, etc., but the draw is really the people I hang out with because I can get a lot of that other stuff from standalone games. In WoW, though, it’s like I get to party with all my friends every night but I don’t have to dress up and put on a facade. I can just be me and people respond favorably for the most part. I’ve made a lot of friends and acquaintances over the last (almost) 4 years and even when they go away or disappear, they usually come back, if only to say hi every once in a while. And then there’s the anticipation when I log in most of the time (unless it’s a scheduled raid or event)…I don’t know who I might see, who’s going to show up on my friend’s list that evening, what adventures await and with who.
Every once in a while, I’ll toy with the idea of changing servers or trying to find a guild that will help me to grow as a healer and get me a more consistant raiding schedule, but then I’d have to start over and I like the people I play with currently, so why would I want to? I am currently a big fish in a little pond, so why should I go be a little fish in a big pond? I have a good reputation, I’m an above average healer, and people seem to enjoy grouping with me or even just hanging around chatting and that’s fine with me. I do have my days where I wish I could just be invisible and focus on whatever I had decided to work on that day without being interrupted, but for the most part, I am content and if I really don’t want to be disturbed, I can go hide on my horde server where I don’t know anyone, although I supposedly have some real life friends who play horde on that server…I just don’t know their names there and, quite frankly, I don’t really care if I ever find out. But I’m sure one day I will and then it will no longer be a place for me to hide. And, knowing me, if I spent enough time there, I would have a circle of friends on that server as well and then I’d be torn about where to spend my time. But for now, it’s nice to know I can get away if I want to…I just usually don’t want to.
