WoW Trial: Days 7, 8 and 9

Here are some more of my notes on WoW. These are more of general points of interest rather than more detailed blow by blow, because I already wrote so much about this game. One thing that has to be said about WoW is that it is immense. For the past week I have been making excursions into various areas and exploring as much of the map as I could, and I still haven’t seen a quarter of the game world. And while the world is pretty static, Blizzard does try to make it seem more dynamic than it really is by using occasional events.

One of such events is the Darkmoon Fair – a traveling carnival that shows up in a different area of the world every month. I lucked out, and the fair set up their tents underneath Thunderbluff at the beginning of this week. Imagine my surprise when I found the usually empty fields outside the town swarming with players and full of odd structures and booths.

Note the Gnome owner with his bodyguard. Sigh… Now I’m beginning to think they are totally abusing this “tiny dude with hueg ogre bodyguard” idea here. This whole Fair reminds me the HBO show Carnival which I really didn’t watch. Or rather I saw pieces of it, but I distinctly remember it was also run by a really tiny midget guy.

Anyways, when this fair appears somewhere, barkers spawn in major cities of Azeroth letting people know where it landed. Here is one I met in Origmar:

Anyway, you are probably interested in what can you do at the fair? You try to score prize tickets from various NPC’s by fetching them strange, hard to find items. You can redeem said tickets for either a flower, or a surprise box/bag. I have no clue what is inside these things because I never had enough tickets. You can also drive around a miniature Tonk – these things are most fun if there are several people doing it. These things can only damage each other but not the players and they have limited range so they are only good for local battles.

You can also get a strong buff from a fortune teller, or buy exotic goods, including booze. Yes, you can get wasted drinking bear, ale and whatever else they serve. Different games simulate intoxication in different ways: some make your character stumble, some randomly switch around your controls every few seconds to emulate the confused unsteady gait. WoW simply blurs the screen – the drunker you are, the less you can see. After chugging several virtual beers my screen looked like this:

I was kinda hoping for something more drastic – like reversed controls, or random swerving and tripping over, but the vision burr. Too bad.

Btw, if you want to check out the Fair, head out to Thunderbluff like NOW. I think they close shop on Friday and I don’t know where and when they are coming back.

My other interesting experience was seeing the Crossroads being attacked by 4 or 5 alliance asshats. You see, this town is relatively close to Ratched which is one of the port cities that connects the two continents. The other entry point from Eastern Kingdom is in Origmar. There is slight difference: Ratchet and Crossroads are mostly populated by players below level 30. Origmar on the other hand has a disproportionately large population of people who already reached level 70. So if you raid that town you will probably get gang raped by high level players eager to do some PvP. Crossroads is safe as the group can battle lv. 30-40 NPC’s while the low level Horde players will mostly just stand around and watch.

It was quite amusing to see the alliance running down all the NPC’s in town, while the players just stood by and gawked. Sadly none of us could really do anything, other than get brutally slaughtered in 1 or 2 blows. Instead we decided to corpse camp the quest givers, and the flight master. They would respawn every few minutes, and then either be run down by the invaders, or they would run off to aid in the defense of the city. I was actually glad this was not a PvP server. It would be really annoying dealing with these people as they were running around and ruining the town.

I mentioned Origmar with regards to Darkmoon fair. It’s actually fairly impressive city. One of the biggest places I have visited in the game so far. When you first approach it all you can see are the outside walls:

Once you get inside though, it’s actually very spacious. I think it is bigger than Thunderbluff but I might be wrong. Perhaps TB just seems smaller because the way it is constructed and divided into 3 level main town, hunter rise, spirit rise and elder rise. Origmar just looks bigger once you walk in:

I managed to reach level 15 so far. It’s unlikely that I will get to 16 before the trial runs out. This is nowhere close the lv 20 cap on the trial account which I kinda wanted to reach. It turns out that it is not possible to get there for a casual player like me in mere 10 days. That is unless you seriously commit to the game, and pump lots of time into it.

I think I will make one more summary post about this, and then that’s it kids. No more WoW stuff on this blog. That was my aim when I started this whole thing. Even if I would decide to buy the game and continue playing I would no longer make these lengthy posts. So this is second to last one in this series.

Will I buy the game? I’m not telling – you will have to read my next WoW post to find out. Yeah, I know – ZOMG Cliffhanger! Deal with it. :mrgreen:

[tags]wow, world of warcraft, blizzard, crossroads, ratchet, pvp, pve[/tags]