A road twice traveled

World of Warcraft has been online for over five years now, and somewhere between 1 and 11 million people have spent crazy amounts of time pretending to be adventurers in a cartoon medieval world hacking monsters with swords, casting spells, raising the dead, and dancing on mailboxes. By now, every semi-serious player of the game has at least one character at level 80.

I've met a ton of people playing this game, and I'm always interested in hearing about their playstyle and what interests them the most. Some people are single-story driven, and they've only played one serious character the whole time, and that's enough for them. Some people play an endless string of different characters and level, group, and even raid with all of them. Some people have a "main," and then an alt or two to dabble around with.

I will be the first person to admit that I am a server locust. I enjoy leveling new characters without help on different servers. I have 5 L80's I could be playing and raiding with at this point, but none of them interest me as much as starting a new story, and I don't mind if the other characters change, so I have no regrets moving from community to community.

Lately I've been playing Alliance characters instead of Horde for two reasons - I've played the Alliance side less so it's more interesting, and the Alliance players seem to be much nicer right now. That changes somewhat, before the Burning Crusade expansion the Horde had more mature players, but the addition of the Blood Elves brought with it an influx of immature players. Most people expect that to shift back in the other direction for Cataclysm when the Alliance get Worgen (werewolves) and the Horde gets Goblins as playable races.

So I'm happy playing solo, and using the game's grouping features to find group situations for me. It creates a set of expectations that I can live by, and minimizes the amount of interaction required with other players. Sometimes it's nice to chat with people, but when extended grouping situations require extended conversation, it gets kinda boring. I like watching them though and seeing what they do. That's made my latest class choice very interesting - I'm playing a rogue.

Rogues aren't the king of the hill in either PvE or PvP settings right now, but they allow a person to bypass a lot of barriers because of their ability to stealth. I can eavesdrop on conversations, sneak into enemy territory, and complete a lot of group quests alone because I can get in and out of trouble areas quickly. I like being a sneaky little thief, and choosing when and how people see me.

Some people just can't stand leveling characters though, and I feel bad for them because the nature of the game dictates that you can never grow too much stronger than anyone else, so there's a limited amount of things you can do at 80. Mind you there's still a lot, but if you play with a min/max attitude and absolutely must be the best, at some point there's not much left you can do to improve yourself. They get frustrated at the slowing pace of progress, yet they are bored to tears with leveling new characters. If that's the case maybe MMOs aren't for them - at least until the games start allowing players to create persistent items in the world, and then they can tap into that empire-building spirit.

Meanwhile, I'll be in the shadows watching.