So, this summer I am playing wow again. I am having a lot of fun with it, mostly been working on my (very) soon to be level 30 Tauren shaman. He's elemental focus, as I am mostly soloing and thus can not afford to focus mostly on tanking or healing. If you know how to read these things here are his wow armory page. I really love playing him, the guild I am in, Horde Knights (corny name I know, blame Panch) is a decent guild. Though we recently had a 30% drop of members and I am curious as to why. I get along nicely with most of our officers. Though I feel a little useless lately as my connection is not near good enough for instances, mostly what I do is that I solo quest. Sometimes I quest with Kilakay, Claire's druid. But I also focus a lot on my secondary skills. Mainly cooking and fishing. The problem there now is that my skill is so much higher than it is supposed to be at this level that I am supposed to go fishing in areas with monsters 20 levels and up higher than me. One of the types of fish that will let me make some nice and really useful soup is  in a ?? area.

The realm I am running this character on is interesting. It's Barren's Chat is mostly in trade chat, which you can ignore. Though sometimes trade is useful to pay attention to. A week or two ago I answered a guys call for some wool cloth (I had some laying around) and he traded me 20 silk cloth for 6 wool cloth. Now this might not have been very useful to most people, but I am a tailor and I had just hit my tailoring level where I work in silk. He then also offered me pretty much any enchant I wanted for free and a port back to Orgrimmar. This is something I have seen quite a bit of, at least horde side, high level players helping lower levels out. It is an interesting contrast to what is going on in the trade chat. Another example is from my guild, right after this one of the players asked me in guild chat if I needed silk cloth, and  I said yes. Then he went and stuck a bunch of it in the guild vault for me.

On the other hand there are high level players, a lot of them Death Knights, who would walk up to a lowly level 15 shaman and challenge them to a duel. I never accepted these. Do they honestly think I got nothing better to do than being killed? I got nothing against the dueling system, in fact I rather like standing outside Ogrimmar watching the duels there, but you could at least ask me if I didn't mind dying for your honor points. However this is something I have mostly seen from Dranei Death Knights in Ratchet so I would say it seems like it is more of an alliance thing than a horde thing. Another thing I find highly annoying is when people just hand you a guild charter to sign. Thankfully that stopped after I joined a guild. But honestly, I am not going to sign a guild charter you have not talked to me about.

But that is all about my experience with the people while playing the game. I have also been catching up on a couple of podcasts. One is the Instance which I highly recommend if you are into wow. They have a very nice production value, and I really like their humor, the way they talk about things and so on. Another one is How I wow which is a series of interviews with people who play wow and how it affects their life. It is not so much about the game but rather about the people. They have talked to people like Curt Schilling, Jonathan Coulton, Felicia Day and many more. I found both through itunes.