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[i-am-gamer]

Vanilla WoW Leveling Experience

(Chapter 3)

Update.

Alright, we are back with another update on the progress so far of my Vanilla WoW Leveling Experience. I have to say, this last session was actually a bit more challenging than the previous one. I’ll explain why shortly. However, challenging doesn’t mean annoying. Quite the contrary actually. I had a lot of fun with it. I think that under normal circumstances I would have gotten frustrated very quickly because I would have been more focused on getting to level cap, but since I’m more interested in the immersive experience, it was way more fun.

Before I dive into the specifics of what went down, I just wanted to give out a little of the basic info about this leveling session. To begin with, I made an adjustment to the sound settings in-game. Just to make the experience that much richer. As I mentioned in the previous post, I turned on the game’s music in order to add more character to the zones that I’ll be leveling in. The volume settings for everything was set to 50% except for ambient noise. I set this to 80%. This way all the footsteps and leaves rustling, the wind and water and sounds of my toon’s armour clinking around, would be more apparent and make it feel more like I’m really there.

Another change I had been wanting to make, was to hide the gold arrow on the minimap that always points towards the next quest I need to do. That wasn’t present in Vanilla WoW. We had to figure out which way to go by reading the quest text. I was able to disable the setting where the minimap shows quest POIs but there wasn’t any way to disable the arrow. In the end, I was able to ‘hide’ it in the sense that I scaled it larger till it was off the minimap. This is something that can be done with the Chinchilla addon.

With that out of the way, I was able to start questing once again. This session lasted about 2 hours in total, and I progressed from level 11 to level 15. I had picked up leveling out in the woods near Dolanaar from the last session but finished that up fairly quickly. Afterwards, a Night Elf Sentinel sent me on a quest across the waters, to the town of Lor’danel, Darkshore. Once I hit level 15, I unlocked the ability to go do dungeons and I also unlocked the first tier of talents in my talent tree. I haven’t decided which one I will take yet as I am debating whether I will continue leveling as Arms, Fury or Protection.

Questing Experience.

Once I got to doing the quests out in Darkshore, I definitely noticed a change in the challenge of what I am doing here. The quests in the Night Elf starting zone haven’t changed much since Vanilla WoW. A lot of them are similar, even post-Cataclysm, as the zone has really not changed since the game began. However, in Darkshore and beyond, the landscape has changed a lot after the Cataclysm, and the quest chains are vastly different from what they were back in Vanilla days. Meaning that I can’t rely on memory anymore in order to complete the quests. This really is rather new to me now, even at such a low level.

I did have a few times while leveling where I really had to basically just look around with my eyes, explore the area until I found what I was looking for, rather than rely on my map to point me in the right direction. The first example was a quest where I needed to rescue 4 survivors from the beach near Lor’danel. The first three were fairly easy to spot, as they were out in the open amongst the other Night Elves that were lying on the beach. The last one that I needed to find, however, was more difficult. I ended up straying too far south and was no longer seeing Night Elves laying on the ground and so I had to turn back.

Along the way, I even tried looking in the water for my last survivor, but with no luck. Finally, on a whim, I decided to head a little further inland, into the woods, and sure enough, in no time, I found the last survivor laying in a bush right at the edge where the beach meets the grass of the woods.

Similarly, in a follow-up quest in the same area, I was searching for a bear carcass in order to obtain a sample from it, for a Gnome. I spent a little time wandering around the woods, killing and dodging some of the bears there, while I searched for this carcass. In the end, I spotted it in a little cove on the side of a hill close to the beach I had previously been on.

One of the last quests I did this session that also involved a bit of exploration, was to find a cave that was west of the waterfall nearby. So the quest said. I hadn’t seen any waterfalls yet along the way, so I had to dive in deeper into the woods in order to find it. Once I did, finding the cave wasn’t too difficult. Just a short walk and a climb up a hill.

Today’s Conclusions.

Overall I’m going to say that I’m still having a lot of fun with this. I definitely haven’t gotten frustrated at all. I was thinking initially that I might have gotten frustrated along the way because of the lack of direction, which has been spoon fed to us all these years. In reality though, it’s been very enjoyable just to feel like I’m a part of the story again, and having to think and figure things out as I go, in order to advance.

This will be all for today’s post but stay tuned for next time. More adventures await!

As always, if anyone has any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to reply on here or to seek me out on Discord (I am Gamer#2546)

[i-am-gamer]

Vanilla WoW Leveling Experience

(Chapter 2)

Update.

The experience has now begun, I went ahead and made the fresh level 1 character as I said I would. I’ll start off with just a little info on what I did. I chose to make my character a night elf, as that is the lore that is the most enjoyable for me. Also, my first two characters I ever made in WoW were night elves, so this might also help take me back to the ‘good ol’ days’. The class I chose was that of warrior. Not only because I know the class very well, but because this character will actually become a roleplay character eventually, and their background has them being a warrior. So it all works out.

Once the character was created, I hit that Add-ons button in the bottom left corner and proceeded to disable any add-ons that might assist me in levelling and questing. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much. In the end, I disabled the Atlas addon, DBM (just in case) and TomTom. I left Mapster installed as it doesn’t actually control the showing/hiding of quest POIs (that was an in-game setting that I disabled) but it still allows me to resize and move the map on my screen.

That being done, I hit the Enter World button and sat back, ready to start this experience. The customary night elf intro video played, and for the first time in a long time, I actually listened to it, intently, soaking in all that it was telling me. Once the video ended, I moved myself off to the side in a less cluttered area. Surprisingly there were several level 1 characters there already, getting started on their own questing. I quickly set up the addons that I did leave enabled and then headed on over to the mailbox.

Inside, I picked up the bags that I had sent myself, and a handful of gold. The bags weren’t anything special, just some 14-slotters that can be bought from a vendor in Stormwind for next to nothing. The gold was really just to be able to buy food or repairs as I went. Will it really be necessary? Probably not since the questing experience has changed in WoW over the years to the point where even a fresh toon is never broke while levelling. All in all, these items really won’t have an impact on the levelling experience.

Now the fun really began. With everything in place, I headed back over to the starting point and picked up the first quest. The NPC basically wanted me to go kill a few sabers out in the wild as their numbers were getting too large. Simple right? Yes it was, but immediately there was already something different. Unlike before, where I could have just looked up at the minimap or opened the world map to see what area was circled off as the best area to find these critters, I had to actually look around in the game world and spot these cats in order to go kill them. Which sometimes, of course, could lead you astray if you’re waiting on respawns and you end up venturing too far from the intended area. But hey, THIS is how it was all those years ago when I did this very same thing for the very first time.

The first couple of quests were the same way. I had to read the quest details carefully and in full in order to figure out what I was doing and where I was going. I didn’t have an arrow to tell me to just go there and then go there, etc. This certainly slowed the pace down quite a bit, but this is what I wanted. The feel of vanilla WoW levelling. I actually didn’t feel the urge to rush around and complete the quests as fast as possible in order to level. I was doing this for the pure enjoyment of the levelling itself, and re-introducing myself to the storyline as I went. Something I hadn’t done in a long time.

Today’s Conclusions.

This particular session, being the first one and likely the easiest one, I got my character up to level 11. I unfortunately did not think to time myself to see how long the progress took me, but I will endeavour to do so in future levelling sessions. I would estimate that it took me an hour to an hour and a half to do this. The experience itself was a lot of fun. I had absolutely zero pressure on my shoulders to get this character levelled fast. Just like back in the day where I had no clue what awaited me in end-game so I felt no reason to rush.

One extra thing to note is that part way through levelling, I popped on my wireless headphones to drown out any outside noise and just fully immerse my ears into the sounds of the game. In my next session, I will actually re-enable the zone music, as I typically have that off while playing my main characters since it’s less distracting for RP.

The feeling that I get so far is that yes, this experience will be harder than just going in, full of heirlooms and ripping through everything as fast as possible, but, that’s what makes it fun. It’s a challenge. No longer was I charging in and using one ability and pretty much one-shotting the mobs like I used to. For the most part, it was taking several attacks before I killed them, and all the while I’m watching my health bar actually diminish. I’ve had to use caution in order to not pull more than I can handle so that I don’t get my character killed.

I will definitely be keeping this up, and as soon as I get another levelling session in, I will definitely be writing up another update. At the very least I will try to write these posts once per week. More often if I end up doing two levelling sessions within in a week.

As always, if anyone has any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to reply on here or to seek me out on Discord (I am Gamer#2546)

[i-am-gamer]

Vanilla WoW Leveling Experience

(Chapter 1)

Preface.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since vanilla (about 2005 / 2006) and the game is currently in its sixth expansion (Legion) at the time of this writing. I still remember seeing the gameplay for the first time on my brother’s computer. This was a fairly new type of game for the time. I had been used to side-scrollers, or platformers all my life, but then I saw WoW and it lived up to its acronym… Wow! I knew I had to play it.

Never before had I seen such an enormous and immersive 3D world in a game. The awe that I felt when I logged in on my first character ever was something else. I spent hours in the starting zone of the night elves just exploring and doing the quests, all to reach a measly level five and then leave for Dolanaar. But guess what? DAMN IT WAS FUN! The music, the visuals, the sound effects, everything about it was an amazing experience. One I’d never seen the likes of before.

Now you might be asking, so what? Five levels? We can knock that out in twenty minutes these days. Why would this be so special? And that is exactly the point of this post. One of a series of posts that I will be writing on the subject. This levelling experience, this immersion into this huge world, just doesn’t feel special anymore.

I understand that the game is now over ten years old and it’s kinda starting to lose its shine. But why? Is it because we’ve gotten so used to the content? So used to the grind? Yes and no. While the overall concept of the game hasn’t really changed (i.e.: level up, do dungeons, gear up, go do end game content, etc.) one thing has changed. Us. The player base.

Back when WoW first launched, no one knew anything about the game. Where things were or how to accomplish certain goals. So what did we do? We ventured forth. We explored. We poked and prodded till we discovered what needed to be done and how and where. Over the years, numerous websites have sprung up dedicated to unravelling all these mysteries of the game. With walk-throughs, strategies, data-mining and databases full of info on how to quest, level and gear up. The need to explore is gone.

No longer are we just playing the game to have fun, and enjoy the experience that is going from brand new character to the level cap. The goal now is and has been for a while, end-game content. It’s become a race to get to max level in order to start getting ready for raiding or PvP (whatever your poison is).

We rush through the levelling experience, we’ve done this before, a nauseating amount of times for some people, and all this HUGE amount of content from level one to max level is getting skimmed through due to guild perks giving extra XP and heirlooms that do the same. Zones are abandoned before even being completed because we out level them to the point where XP gain per hour is no longer worth it. So we go somewhere else. It’s become a game of numbers and efficiency and streamlining. Both in levelling and once we’ve gotten to end game content. You can even now pay to boost your character to the last expansions max level and start working on current content instead.

Now, am I guilty of all these things? Absolutely. And it wasn’t until recently that I fully understood why I didn’t feel the same about this game as I did for several years after I had started playing it. So I decided to try something, and this is why I will be creating this series of blogs posts to document the journey.

The Solution.

Now that I’ve identified the problem, for myself at least, I thought up of an idea to attempt to bring back some of that old-school feeling of the game. For the last two expansions, I really haven’t enjoyed raiding all that much. I did raid what was current content on normal and heroic modes, however, it just wasn’t enjoyable like it was for me back in the earlier expansions. Having decided to finally hang up my shield (I was a warrior tank since vanilla) and quit raiding for good, I could now focus on this new endeavour in-game.

Before I explain it, I just wanted to leave a little background here. I’ve been raiding since pretty much the start of my time in WoW, and I’m also an avid roleplayer in-game. My characters currently reside on the Moon Guard server and more often than not when I am logged in, it is to roleplay.

Now with that out of the way, here is the endeavour. I have created a fresh, level one night elf warrior in the night elf starting zone and I will begin levelling them. The stipulations I set forth for myself, however, are as follows:

No add-ons that help me with questing will be permitted.

No heirlooms can be used.

Only the gear available to me from vendors and/or quest rewards can be used.

The chauffeured motorcycle cannot be used for levels 1-20.

Flying mounts will not be permitted, even when they are available.

Quest POIs on the map and minimap have been disabled in the settings.

The idea behind all this is to try and eliminate any of the aids that Blizzard has put into the game, or that I have used via add-ons over the years, and make the levelling experience as vanilla as possible.

Without add-ons, I will have to read the quest info carefully to make sure I know where I am going. I won’t be able to rely on an arrow pointing me in the right direction, or the quest POI blobs showing me where on the map I can complete a quest. I’ll have to go find the area myself. Without the heirlooms, I won’t get boosted XP from quests and kills, nor will I have a power advantage over the mobs I am killing. Lastly, without the chauffered motorcycle or flying mounts, I will have to run/ground mount it wherever I need to go. I won’t be able to just fly in, obtain my objective and fly out without first going through several mobs to reach the intended target.

My intention is to level this toon all the way up to current content (regardless of how long that takes as I won’t be doing this every day) and then report back here periodically with my progress and any insights or thoughts I have to share about the latest levelling session. I hope you all enjoy this experience as I write about it, and if any of you feel the same way, I invite you to participate in this journey. Let me know how it’s going for you if you do participate.

As always, if anyone has any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to reply on here or to seek me out on Discord (I am Gamer#2546)

[i-am-gamer]

Kaldorei and Father Time

(The Night Elf aging process for role-players)

When is a Night Elf considered an adult?

I hear this question get asked many times. Following that, there is generally a series of questions and debate over the aging of elves in World of Warcraft and much confusion ensues. I’d like to take this time to lay down some insight that I have on this topic. Please read this with an open mind as none of this is cannon, because Blizzard has not specified exactly how they age, but, this is what I’ve compiled after reading many a lore page on kaldorei and it also seems to be the consensus among most roleplayers.

Before we begin, there are two terms that I will be using heavily in this article. Physical maturity and Mental maturity. Physical maturity is when a person has grown from baby to child to teenager and finally adult. Their bodies are physically mature when they finish this growth. Mental maturity, on the other hand, does not necessarily need to coincide with the physical one.

Take for example, centuries ago, a boy or young teenager would be considered a man upon reaching a certain age, even if they were still growing. This was due to shorter life spans and needing offspring to follow in the father’s footsteps at a young age. This was considered mentally mature by society. Contrary to this, a longer-lived race (or immortal one) has so much more time, that reaching mental maturity, is something that can take much longer, acquiring more experience in life, before becoming mature enough to be seen as an adult by society. Armed with these definitions, let’s dig in.

Do Night Elves age?

Simply put, yes they do. The better question is, do they age in the same way we, as human beings, know it? This is where the confusion sets in. Let’s look at ourselves as a race first.

We are born, we grow and age and generally go from being babies to children, teenagers to adults, middle-aged to old age. For the sake of simplicity, let us say that the average human lifespan is about 100 years. This would put infancy at the 0-2 year mark more or less. Childhood would then span to the age of 12 and the teenage years continue on to 19. At 20-21 a person is considered an adult, both physically and mentally mature. Middle age follows around 50 years old and old age at 65+.

So you might be thinking, let’s just do some math and extrapolate what that means in Night Elf years (think dog years in reverse). Alas, this is where the issue lies. We can’t simply do the math. The categories of what is considered infancy, childhood, teenager, etc, for Night Elves, does not fit neatly into an equation.

Why is this you may ask? Well, because the Night Elves, until not that long ago, were immortal. They could still die from being killed or succumbing to a disease for example, but they did not die of old age. Here is why we have to look at ageing in two distinct ways. Physical ageing (physical maturity), and mental ageing (mental maturity).

Physical ageing (physical maturity).

Like any living being, they started as babies, grew into children then teenagers and finally adults. But here is where things get tricky. Unlike humans (or other mortal beings) they did not reach an apex where they then started deteriorating into an old, frail person and die of old age. They were immortal. Certainly they would hit a peak and then dip from there. But it was a very shallow dip, and likely not a continuous one. Do you see any old Night Elves, hunched over, walking with a cane? No, you don’t.

Middle-aged is a category that just doesn’t exist for Night Elves. Certainly not while they were immortal. We’ll get to the implications of their mortality further down. So how do you categorize their ageing? Don’t think of them as going from children to teens, then adults to old men and women, but rather going from children to physical maturity. Once they have reached the age of physical maturity (again about 20-21 years old), they are physically what we would consider adults, and from here their physical ageing plateaus rather than being a downwards curve towards old age. They have a constant rate of growth till they are physically mature and then level off, unlike mortal beings that have a steady growth, reach their peak and then fall off steadily towards old age and die.

Before going on to the mental ageing (mental maturity), let’s look at what being a mortal Night Elf means. No longer are they immune to the wraths of old age and time. So just as a human being, they will now reach a peak in their physical ageing, before slowly dipping back down and becoming frail and weak, and, well... old.

Of course, Night Elves are an extremely long-lived race. Not as long as Draenei, but it is generally accepted that they can live many thousands of years. Which can be many thousands of years more for those who are already several millennia old due to having been immortal for most of their lives.

The rate at which a Night Elf grows to their peak (i.e.: physical maturity) is roughly the same as any humanoid, about 20-21 years. They then slowly plateau and curve back down towards old age, and it is THIS aspect of Night Elf ageing where things seem to slow down. This will span a very long time. So the change will take centuries to see. Perhaps even millennia.

Mental ageing (mental maturity).

Now that we have the physical ageing out of the way, let’s tackle their mental faculties. When we say adult, we can mean it in two ways. He or she is an adult, in that they have aged to 20-21 years old, or, that mentally they have matured enough to be considered an adult.

For most humans, reaching the physical age of 20-21 coincides more or less with reaching the socially accepted mental level of maturity to accompany the status of adulthood. For Night Elves, however, this is not the case. A race, who was once immortal, would naturally place a higher standard as to what was considered ‘mentally mature’ versus what was still ‘young’ by societal standards in their culture.

What happens here is that, a Night Elf may physically reach maturity, in that, they have become fully grown and can physically operate like any other mature member of Night Elven society (physical maturity), but, where their mental maturity (i.e.: life experience) level stands, is not yet that of a Night Elf that has ‘come of age.’ One very important thing here to note (and this is not cannon but rather accepted norms of role-players) is that Night Elves will physically reach their adulthood at around 20-21 years of age much like humans.

So you see, this is why the questions of how do Night Elves age, when is adulthood, childhood, etc, are not so clean cut in terms of an answer.

Where to go from here?

How might you use this information now you may ask? Well, that will depend on your character and how you want to play them. It would generally be a better idea to decide their personality and how ‘mature’ you want them to be mentally, before you decide on an age for them physically.

If, for example, you believe your character to be young, with the mind of a child, then it’s not likely that they will be more than a few years old physically. A year would equal 365 days as we know it. A Night Elf that is a little more experienced, say, what we call a teenager, would equally be somewhere in the age range of 13-19 years old physically and would physically appear as being 13-19 years of age.

As for a Night Elf that you would like to consider having come of age, meaning that they are recognized by society as being a mature adult mentally, the generally accepted age range would be that of 200-300 years old physically. Since one cannot apply the terms of older child, teenager, and young adult to Night Elves, the ages between say 12 to around 250 years old physically, is simply a transitioning from youngling to adult.

For Night Elves that are now beyond those years, whether it be 500 years old, 1,000 years old or 8,000 years old, they are all going to appear to be about the same. However, their age will indirectly imply their maturity to the point of being considered venerable after several millennia.

The longer the life they have lived, the more life experience they have and the more wisdom they have obtained and are able to pass on to younger Night Elves. Please do keep in mind, that with the timeline set by Blizzard, the oldest a Night Elf could potentially be in present time, will not exceed the age of 10,000 - 15,000 years old by much. As that was more or less when they were created.

I hope that this has been informative and comprehensive. As with anything roleplaying, I love to help inform, discuss and explain things. If anyone has any questions or confusions, don’t hesitate to seek me out on Discord (I am Gamer#2546)