This list of my current World of Warcraft characters was prompted by a question asked by
I’m strongly considering updating this every once and a while… but how many of you would actually care? Table and more details behind the cut.
| Name | Level | Race | Class | Profession 1 | Profession 2 | Realm | Realm Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feaglin | 10 | Gnome | Warrior | Mining | Engineering | Kael’Thas | Normal |
| Thrun | 18 | Tauren | Hunter | Skinning | Leatherworking | Bloodscalp | PvP |
| Macomb | 16 | Human | Paladin | Mining | Blacksmithing | Kael’Thas | Normal |
| Krios | 6 | Night Elf | Druid | Tailoring | Enchanting | Kael’Thas | Normal |
| Kjållström | 20 | Dwarf | Rogue | Mining | Engineering | Kirin Tor | RP |
If you don’t know the lingo, “PvP” means “Player vs. Player”, so part of the game is ongoing warfare between the Alliance and Horde characters, as opposed to “PvE” meaning “Player vs. Environment”. “RP” means “Roleplaying”, so you’re expected to stay in-character in most game chats and generally try to develop some sort of backstory for your character.
For the very observant, you will notice among those five names two of my own family names from at least three generations back, a name of one of my old D&D characters (from a campaign with Emery), a famous roboticist, and a planet in Star Trek. Totally Worthless Nick Points™ to those who can tell which are which.
Feaglin was my first character, but I wasn’t really sure of how to play the game so I missed getting some things set up during my low levels. I also didn’t really interact with any other players significantly, which makes a lot of the quests pretty boring. I thought starting out with a Warrior would make it easier to learn, but I very quickly wanted to move on to bigger and better things.
Thrun was my next character; I created him mainly because so many people told me that it sucked to play the Horde. I plan to continue having fun playing the Horde, thank you very much. I chose Bloodscalp because that’s where a number of Swatties play, although since they’ve had the game for many months, they’re all exponentially more powerful than me.
Macomb and Krios were created to play with Markus and Gus, two of my friends from high school and the last remaining members of our Dungeons & Dragons group. We’re trying to relive those old days through WoW. We have a team of Night Elves for when all three of us are available, and then our human characters we play in pairs and generally keep up with each other asynchronously. Unfortunately, between work and classes and real life, we haven’t been able to get all three of us together.
We use Skype VoiP conferencing to talk when we play, which is a lot better than chatting via text in-game. Probably something to do with the gameplaying and linguistic centers of my brain both fighting over one I/O channel.
Finally, Kjållström is my foray into the actual role-playing component of the MMORPG. As you can see, I’ve spent the most time leveling him… largely because I found a great guild to play with, and I really enjoy the role-playing. This is on top of the fact that most of the quests I’ve completed with him were ones I’ve already done with either Feaglin or Macomb.
Obviously, WoW supports Unicode because of all of the international players, which is why a name like Kjållström works. It’s actually a great way to detect Mac users in the game, because they’re far more likely to know how to type those characters using their default input setup (option-a and option-u o, respectively) than a Windows user (alt-character code I can never remember). This has caused some slight problems with joining quest parties, but not enough to make me considering changing. I’d considering using non-ASCII characters in many of my characters names, because it significantly reduces the likelihood of a namespace collision and makes for more interesting names.
Still addicted to WoW.
