I was in the game early. I've been a Blizzard gamer for years, ever since the first Warcraft. I'm terrible at strategy games though, so while I enjoyed Warcraft titles I was much more deeply involved in Diablo and Diablo II. When World of Warcraft came out, many of my friends from another online game I was playing started it, and I was certainly going to come along to check it out. That said, I had not been a part of a community as large (even in 2004) before, and it was interesting to be a part of such a large community. With such a robust game world, even at launch, there was a lot to be discussed, a lot of questions that had not yet been answered a thousand times. I still recall the first time someone asked where to find Mankrik's wife, and we had to look it up in game. That sort of communal learning, where we're all in the same boat, and all finding things for the first time, it really appeals to me. .

World of Warcraft is my first MMORPG. I came to World of Warcraft from a heavy role-playing MUD (multi-user dungeon) that I had played for a little over a year prior. Before that I was a heavy Diablo II player, on the US East server, and before that Diablo itself. I've always been a game player: I still have a first-edition printing of the TSR Monster Manual, inscribed "Merry Christmas 1981, Love Mommy and Daddy." But World of Warcraft is the first MMORPG I've had a real taste for. As much as I loved the MUDs I was playing, a player base of 400-500 is not quite the same scenario..

For the first year of World of Warcraft, I did mostly questing and exploration-type things. I was a roleplayer, so I would follow quest chains into dungeons, but not seek the dungeons other than that. I spent that time on the forums as well, of course, and I read a lot about dungeon runs and the ways in which people mess them up. I got an impression of hours of work, all ruined due to one person’s ineptitude. Rather than be that person, I ran very few dungeons that first year. Much of that first year on the forums was spent at level 58. Once I got there I started doing a lot of lower-level runs with newer players in my guild, while exploring lower-level quest lines I’d never done on the way up. That’s where I started really defending the casual gamer. I was always one to play “two to three hours a night on two to three nights out of the week,” which wasn’t much of a raiding schedule, and pretty much forces a casual style. But to the hardcore players who dismissed any player under the level cap, who hadn’t killed Ragnaros a dozen times, I would always point out that there was plenty to do before the level cap, and have fun doing it.

Roleplay is always going to be hard in a fast paced game like World of Warcraft. The time it takes you to greet someone “in character” is often the time it takes them to run past you on their mount, grab three quests from the quest giver you’re next to, and ride off to go do them. Meanwhile, you’ve just completed your greeting and cheerfully ask nobody “Hello there, would you like a hand with the work around here?” But it’s there to be had, you just have to put yourself out there. I’ve always felt that in World of Warcraft, people are not expecting to role-play, even on a role-playing server. So you have to be the first one to start. I like to offer a comparison on the forums. Between the above greeting and “hay u wnt grp” which is more appealing? Which is more likely to get a conversation, and which more likely to get a wordless group invite and an equally wordless group? If that’s what you’re looking for, have at it, but for me I prefer a group to be a group outing, rather than a rote exercise. Imagine you and some friends meet up out on the town, and then you spend a couple hours hanging out together in total silence, while all doing the same thing. I’m quick to start a conversation in character, and I keep talking as long as folks are interacting. Often it takes nothing more than the use of complete sentences and punctuation, and people begin doing the same. Role-play isn’t a matter of “thee” and “thou” all over the place. It’s just a matter of acting as though the avatar on your screen is an actual person. I can’t imagine spending five years of my life playing a character that meant nothing more to me than a pile of integers. For me there’s a story to Warcraft, and Palehoof is a character in that story. Not a huge character. He’s just the eldest scion of an old and not well respected tauren clan; a clan which was hoodwinked into becoming the test subjects and lab assistants of a gnome. But he’s a character in the greater story nonetheless.

I have always been a fan of fantasy world technology, from the gnomes of Mount Nevermind in Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s “Dragonlance Saga” to the steampunk mad science of Phil Foglio’s “Girl Genius,” including a couple hundred red cards and most of the Urza’s Saga expansion in “Magic: the Gathering.” For as long as gnomes and goblins have been part of Warcraft, I’ve always enjoyed the traditional image engineering has had: goblins blow things up, really HARD if not really WELL, while gnomes try to bend reality, as often as not turning something into a chicken. When I began planning for World of Warcraft, I had been convinced to try it out by a friend using a single phrase: “minotaurs with blunderbusses.” You will notice that five years later I am still playing a tauren hunter, of course. I never considered another profession. Brady Games’s strategy guide, the first printing that came out right at release, explained that engineering made guns, ammo, and goggles…and I stopped reading there because I had to go buy the game. I built that into my character’s story. Engineering is a reasonable choice for a hunter, since hunters have ample opportunity to test firearms, scopes, ammunition, explosives, and ray guns. Being some 30 yards distant from your target is handy for not only survivability but also to give one breathing room to make notes on a new device’s efficacy, as Uncle Geargrinder used to say. I also found it amusing to think of a tauren, a big, lumbering, nature-loving type, being involved in the decidedly unnatural and highly delicate world of advanced engineering. Like a bull in a machine shop, I think it’s amusing to picture Palehoof at work with gnomish technology, using a pair of tauren-sized needle-nose pliers to hold a pair of regular-sized needle-nose pliers to hold a gnome-sized screwdriver. Coming up with the backstory of how Palehoof’s clan was tricked by a gnome in disguise into all becoming engineers just added a laugh to the story: now I had a character who was comically physically unsuited to being an Engineer, who is only an engineer because his entire clan is extremely gullible, who is nonetheless a true master of the craft. I’ve always warned people who are considering engineering as a profession, if you seek the profession for PVP, PVE, marketability, or reliability, you might be disappointed down the line. On the other hand, if you seek the profession because you just think it’s cool to be an engineer, you’re in the right place. That’s what drew me to engineering, and the feel of the profession has stayed largely true to what I liked about it in 2004. I’ve never had another profession.

Recent raiding experience I’ve gotten has really only been a matter of logistics. My available time online for the first years of World of Warcraft was pretty much limited to logging off at nine o’clock server time, which doesn’t lend itself well to a raiding schedule. Just since this past summer I’ve had later nights available, and I’ve been able to cash in four years’ worth of “Wish you could raid with us” from guildmates and old friends. I used to often call myself a raider trapped in a casual’s body. I was willing to spend the time and energy; willing to wait in line for a slot. I just didn’t have the available online time. My gear level was, as I liked to put it, “standard-issue Heroic dungeon/engineer hunter.” Goggles and Heroic five-person drops: it’s what kept me in business from Burning Crusade up to the summer of 2009. I like the reputations and factions you can work with as part of the character’s storyline. As a roleplayer I like the progress of the character through arcs such as earning successive Champion titles at the Argent Tournament, or befriending and then becoming a hero to the funguys in Zangarmarsh. As a raider I like running for content as well as farming, but the progression one gets in an instance doesn’t lend itself to an ongoing narrative. One of the things we can change in the world is how factions interact with us, and that reflects on our characters’ development. Raiding doesn’t do that as much: Onyxia will never remember that you’ve met, much less that you killed her the last time. It has to be that way, of course. Bosses can’t drop their whole loot table every kill, so you have to run dungeons over and over again. I just get as much of a charge from making exalted with a new faction as I do from picking up a 25-person crossbow drop. If it were a 25-person gun drop, now, that’s a whole other story.

I’m no kind of PVPer at all. (Total Honorable Kills: 840) I have only played seriously on PVP servers, though. I started on Kel’thuzad, a first-generation PVP server, before there were RP-PVPs available. A year later when Lightninghoof (RPPVP) opened, transfers were not available, so I had to re-roll. Why would such a terrible PVPer roll on two consecutive PVP servers? I like the risk. Palehoof as a character likes gnomes. He thinks all of them are engineers who would be proud to know he’s learned their craft. I like greeting gnomes like they are old friends in game, and that’s funnier if they’re killing me while I’m doing so. But other than defending other Horde players, my PVP experience is more or less entirely limited to quest and achievement requirements. As we speak, the only thing holding me back from “What a Long Strange Trip” is the Children’s Week PVP achievement. And the second to last thing was the Winter Veil PVP achievement, which I just completed last month.

I had enough time to look down and see a pile of skeletons below me. Something about that still tickles me. “Room for one more, Palehoof.”

I’ll admit I like the recognition. It’s like being the mascot for a well known sports team. People don’t really know who you are, but they know you. Sometimes that recognition draws some forum fire, but that’s part of any online forum. People don’t always disagree over tea and crumpets. But more than that, I like sharing information with people who have a common interest with me. And I was doing that for a year before I was ever an MVP. I enjoy seeing the game through a new player’s eyes, and I like to meet strangers, even for a moment, and trade a word or two. World of Warcraft is a big game, but it’s an even bigger culture. People arriving newly to that culture can be overwhelmed. I came to World of Warcraft with about a dozen friends from another game, and we had a built-in guild by the time I had started. So I already had a guild leadership to advise me, and never had to walk into the game alone and unaided. Of course, data-collecting sites make it hard to really go into Azeroth “blind” these days, but even so I like to be a voice saying welcome, and perhaps muttering a “don’t panic” to the little folks too. One of the greatest compliments I’ve gotten in game was from a level-1 tauren shaman I was helping out in Mulgore. “Don’t take this wrong, but are you a person or an NPC?” .

Well, the advantage of having been a largely casual player for the first four and a half years of World of Warcraft is that I’m not tired of a lot of content. There’s a lot I haven’t done, which is made all the more challenging by the fact that it’s kind of historical. Not as easy to find a raid for Ahn’Qiraj these days, but then again you don’t have to find as many people. Plus World of Warcraft is very much a game of moving goalposts. No sooner do you reach a goal than you see the next one on the horizon. A casual look at my Armory profile will demonstrate there’s a few goals I have yet to reach. I’ve got to finish Loremaster before Cataclysm wrecks everything! On the forums, there’s new players starting every day. We see as many “Why is the server down on Tuesday” threads now as we did in May of 2005. If I liked being a voice saying welcome in 2004, there’s still people to welcome in 2010. Fondest memories? I had almost escaped from a dwarven paladin once in my 40s, when I turned around and shot him with a Gnomish Net Projector. Thing misfired. It dragged me back to him and rooted us both in place. My dad started playing January 1 of 2009. I remember coaching him on group tactics for a hunter. That was a lot of fun. I don’t have really any workable alts, so I ran around with Dad leveling in Outland using a throwing knife instead of a ranged weapon. Got my Thrown to 450, and it gave Dad a chance to do something, since I was 80 and he was 57. At the time he said he probably wouldn’t really need to know much about group tactics; he didn’t think he’d be getting that involved in the social aspect of the game. He outgeared me by June, and had more /played than me by November. He’s also a guild officer and bank custodian. What have I created? The first time my Gnomish Transporter to Gadgetzan misfired. I materialized a mile or so in the air above Tanaris. I had enough time to look down and see a pile of skeletons below me. Something about that still tickles me. “Room for one more, Palehoof.” I liked it so much I made a motivational poster for Engineering based on it. Then I made another one. I need to update that, actually; I have one at each level cap.

I’ve never played a rogue or a goblin engineer. I think the first order of business will be to make a Goblin and kill both birds with one stone. My poor death knight is still only 68, and I made him on the first day of Wrath of the Lich King. I’m not good with alts; I mistreat them terribly. But I will definitely start a goblin rogue and a worgen as well, some class I’ve never played, of which there are several. I have no doubt that I’ll come back to Palehoof as my main character before long though. What I’m really looking forward to is seeing the new face of the world. I’m relatively familiar with the way it’s shaped now. I can’t wait to see it after the shakeup, particularly from the back of an X-51 Nether Rocket.