Back on the Crack

I reactivated my World of Warcraft subscription the other day, and it's still fun. I've run around a bit with my character Varshak on Frostmane, but the big plan this time is to start a brand spanking new character on the new Oceanic PvP server with some Australian friends. We're planning on playing once per week, on Thursday nights from about 7pm-12am. That way it's much like cards night with the boys, and can be justified to university schedules, social calendars and wives. We're also trying to get five of us together, so we don't have to deal with the asshole factor when running instances. Well, maybe we'll just be grouping up with assholes that we actually know.

We had hoped to get a solid crew of five together right away, since most instances in the game are built for groups of five, but we've only got four right now. We ran around last week in the newbie areas and got up a few levels, but we hit a bit of a snag. It seems you're much better off going solo and knocking over the introductory quests by yourself - at least until when you start doing the early instances, like Ragefire Chasm and The Deadmines. So, we grabbed a few levels and decided to meet up again the following week at level 12, hopefully with a fifth stalwart group member to round out our motley group.

We're also making use of Teamspeak, so we can chat while we're playing. This is not only for precision coordination of battles, but also for general bullshit talk for the quiet times. This is an MMO we're talking about, so there's usually plenty of those, although hopefully with a bit of organization we can keep them to a minimum. Teamspeak is a bit of a grumpy ferret to tame though, or rather PCs and microphones are, as they're the usual parts of the system that cause grief. If the microphone is crap quality, you're boned. If the position of the microphone is bad (which depends on the type of the microphone), you're boned. If the Windows settings are messed up (which can be in about four different places), you're boned. If you're lucky, you come off sounding like a fuzz guitar in the belly of a large rottweiler. If you unlucky, nothing happens, you don't know why, and everyone ignores you, because to them you didn't say anything. It's very frustrating, and the only piece of advice I have is to buy a decent microphone, and test it out using Windows Sound Recorder or something similar before you play.

Anyway, I've rolled up an Undead Mage called Raemus on the Barthilas server. Send me a tell if you're up for being the fifth member of our crew, but only if you're on Oceanic time. And you're not a dick.