My fire mage is almost ready to look for her first pug. She’s at 11 now, and has left her humble home in Brill to start picking up the Ragefire Chasm quests around Kalimdor. In the next day or so, she’ll make the long walk to Thunder Bluff to get the last of them, and enter the LFG.
If I had to sum up the experience of leveling her so far in just one word, the word would be “quiet.” There were only about 10 or so other people in Deathknell when I started her. (When I created my most recent Blood Elf, there were more than 20 others around.) I appeared about the same time as a few other folks, so it was kind of fun to run around together, casting our baby buffs on one another. I didn’t group with anyone (no point at that point), but a few of us did end up watching each others’ backs in the cave with the spiders. (Taking on more than one of those bugs when all you’re wearing is a frayed robe can make for a close fight.) I pondered the names people had chosen, and wondered about the futures of the characters. Some had the words “heal,” “tank,” and “melt” in them, so clearly the player had a path in mind for them. For the record, mine does not have “pug” as a syllable.
I had chosen the scary black-strappy-things-across-the-face look because I hadn’t seen them on many of the Forsaken that I’d grouped with before. Most players seemed to choose the slightly more attractive looking faces. Looking around at the other players just starting out, it seemed like more than half of them, male and female, had chosen the same feature! But maybe it always seems like that. Like when you decide you’re going to start a shaman, for example, because there don’t seem to be many shamans in your guild/server, but then everyone in your starting area is also a shaman.
Anyway, it’s been so quiet, I’ve actually found myself getting a little lonely and looking for interaction. I’m on an RP server, but I usually mind my own business and don’t strike up conversations with others unless they start talking with me first. Without guild conversation to keep me company, I’ve found myself emoting more when encountering other players. I cackle wildly as I run through the town, I bow to the higher level characters on the zeppelins, and sometimes I even salute the NPCs after I accept a quest. I also bought a pet cockroach from the guy under the stairs in the Undercity. *Looks around self-consciously*
I’m sure I’ll have plenty of company once I start looking for groups, as I will be in the General, Trade, and Local Defense channels again. I don’t particularly enjoy the thought of this. I can’t stand the chatter there, so for all my other characters, I’ve left those channels as soon as possible, and relied solely on the official LFG channel for finding pugs. I know some view LFG as a n00btastic approach to finding a group, but I view the ability to use it as a sign of at least a minimal amount of intelligence. I hear that it’s sometimes much faster getting a group in those other channels, since that’s how it was apparently done before LFG, so I’ll just have to tough it out.
Next post: Ragefire Chasm!
