Mom Posts!

Mom did a lot of reading yesterday, and she sent me an email with her thoughts.  Here it is, copied and pasted directly from the source:


For the past two days I've been doing a LOT of reading and surfing.

Because WoW is the largest MMORPG in the world, there are gazillions of websites and they are not all created equal.  

I've done a lot of reading on the joystiq site, there is a lot of good stuff there but I find it gets very involved very fast, it's not well organized and I keep getting sucked into reading lore and back story.  But their Rookie Guide and Seven Things Every Newbie Needs To Know posts are very helpful.  I did learn an important lesson on this site, look at the date the information was posted.  I got into a long story about something that was broken and when I got to the end, realized it happened in 2007!  The joystiq site has fascinating lore posts.

One thing I spent many, many hours looking for was a good map of the world.  Given my aviation background, finding a map to orient myself was proving to be a frustrating quest of its own until I found this site:  http://wow.gamepressure.com/map.asp?ID=87  No wonder I couldn't figure out what I was doing on the Eastern Kingdoms, I'm not on Eastern Kingdoms!  How the heck did you ever find me?  Have you ever been to Azuremyst Isle before?

I think the best overview beginner's guide is right on the game sight itself ... duh!  I just found it about an hour ago so I'm working through that now and hopefully I'll call it quits for the day after that.  I'm exhausted.  A few hours ago I thought about logging in to do some game play but got side-tracked reading something and now I think I'll be too clumsy/tired to enjoy it.

I feel much better and knowledgable now that I have myself mentally oriented with a map.  I didn't know how much that was stressing me out 'til I realized how relieved I was once I figured out where I was in the big scheme of things.  I'm rather comforted to learn that out of all the starting portals I picked the most obscure and least likely to be visited by hordes in the whole game! 

As I mentioned earlier on the phone, I've read about key bindings and macros, looking forward to getting to the point of using them.  I've also read about Add ons.  Do you use them a little, a lot or not at all?  My guess is with your aversion to downloading you probably use very few.  I can see that one has to be choosey about them and do a lot of reading to find a reputable and dependable coder or you can get into a lot of trouble and break the game for yourself pretty badly.  But it looks very tempting to automate a lot of functions.  But where do you draw the line between being efficient and cheating?  I'd be curious to hear from other players in the guild and what their thought are.

My big take-aways from the past two days of research and reading are:

• get organized [I have a chart for keyboard shortcuts, key bindings and macros set up on the back of my Wow notebook][that also ate up a few hours of time but it is a "crafty" endeavour so I enjoyed colour coding and stencilling LOL]
• look at the date of what you are reading to see if it is current
• start with the game site, they usually have the basics of what you're looking for!

and a picture is worth a thousand words - my newly organized bookmarks for Wow - this is what I've been reading about.

Also, I've been thinking I'll need a headset/microphone sooner rather that later.  It will make learning and communicating that much easer.