Well I did it. I subscribed to World of Warcraft for the first time in I don’t know how many years. And my first hour or so was just WEIRD.

First strange thing is, just a few weeks ago I started a new character using the “Free until level 20” system and I played him for maybe 10 minutes before thinking “Nope, this isn’t for me.” This time I once again started a new character and enjoyed it. What changed? I guess my mood, or maybe it was because that first character was an ugly human male and this time I made a more attractive human female. Maybe I really AM that shallow!

Although Krikket had kindly invited me to join her on her server, I ended up rolling on good old Kirin Tor which is an RP server. I take it that what server you are on doesn’t really matter these days and I doubt anyone still role-plays but JUST in case, I wanted to play on an RP server. Not that I RP much but back in ye olden days I used to enjoy watching role play while acting almost like an ‘extra’ in whatever drama was going down.

Then finally I started playing and there were a lot of things I’d forgotten. Little stuff like, to open your inventory you don’t hit I, you hit B, for Bags. When you loot a corpse I’m not seeing a “Take all” option but I figure it has to be in there somewhere; maybe I need to check the options or something. With stuff like this, I don’t know if things have changed or if back in the day I had keys rebound or mods to help. But it felt slightly awkward and I was happy to be playing a new character, who is in a zone I’ve never been in before which sorta helps my brain process changes better. If I was at the Northshire Abbey I’d be hella confused.

There’s a lot of other little things I don’t understand, like some characters have an * after their name. Some NPCs have 3 dots over there head. I THINK that means they’re waiting for you but I’m not sure. There’s now a Newcomer Chat channel and folks were actually being helpful in it! Stranger still, I had questions!

There’s now the Warband stuff that gathers all (??) of your characters under one umbrella. For me it’s a little odd since I’ve used the same name over and over on different servers so I had several characters with the same name appearing on my login screen. Finally figured that one out: the characters you have tagged as “Favorites” show up on that screen so I shuffled some low level alts up there for the screenshot at the top of this post.

I had a moment of panic when I couldn’t find my old “Main” character from Vanilla WoW, but then I remembered the “level smush” they did a few years back. I’d heard about it but never experienced it. Turns out that very handsome level 25 hunter named Meglivorn on the left in the screenshot up there is my vanilla WoW level 60 hunter. I have several Meglivorn characters which is why I didn’t put it together right away, then I noticed his Warg Companion and blank tabard and realized THAT was him. I’ll have to wake him up eventually.

[Vanilla WOW trivia: Back when I was in a guild Meg the Hunter would be who pulled the boss in several dungeons. Imagine if a DPS pulled today! But he’d pull the boss and kite him for as long and as far as possible while the rest of the group burned down any sub-bosses or other riff-raff, then they’d give me the word and I’d have Meg Feign Death to drop the aggro. The boss would then turn and walk back to his starting point where the rest of the party was all set to pound him.]

In for a penny, in for a pound. I signed up for a 3-month subscription just to try to incentivize myself to stick with it, AND I pre-ordered The War Within. So we’ll see how this goes. I only stopped playing last night because it was getting late, so that’s a good sign, I guess! As to the cost, it struck me that with virtually EVERYTHING going up in price these days, a WoW sub costs the same as it ever has, which makes it feel like more of a bargain than it used to. That 3-month sub cost me about the same as what we spend on a fast food dinner for 2 and a movie rental on a Saturday night, and it’s for 3 months. So not so bad, really. Maybe I’m just justifying… 🙂

Next step is to ask around to see what mods are hot these days because of course even if I could remember the UI mods I used to use, that doesn’t mean they are still supported. I also may need some tips on the best/most efficient way to play on a widescreen. I feel like some important data is now out of my central viewing area, if that makes sense (see screenshot). And I need to read up on what exactly this Warband stuff is for. I do know that some quests told me that another member of my warband had already completed it (presumably the other alt I’d rolled up a couple weeks back). And I think I’ll go through and delete some of these alts because I have a ridiculous number and many of them are VERY low level (like under 5). So there’s some tidying to be done.

And here is where I was going to share the “Warcraft Story” for one of my old mains, but none of them seem to be findable, probably because they haven’t been logged in for years and I’m not really ready to deal with logging them in yet since I know a cascade of random pop-ups will happen when I do. My new character, Petrarav (did you know WoW doesn’t allow spaces in names? Her name SHOULD be Petra Rav, which is the name of my Guild Wars 2 character, Petra being a character in both Destiny 2 and Horizon Forbidden West, and Rav being a shortened version of Ravach, a name I often use for male characters — particular those that lean toward barbarian or boisterous cultures.) doesn’t have a story yet either, presumably because she was just born.

So that’s my WoW story for now. With trying to play Guild Wars 2 and Diablo IV and World of Warcraft AND Fallout 76…well obviously either something has to give or I just won’t make any progress anywhere, but as I said the other day, I’m just feeling rather self-indulgent right now, and I’m gonna play what I want, when I want, at least while this PC gaming honeymoon period is on-going. I’m not in any guilds anywhere or anything so if I just vanish from some of these games, no one but me will notice.