Day 2: 'Character Gen & WoW'

World of Warcraft is currently the biggest MMO.  Released 7 years ago, in 2001 the game has grown in popularity at a world wide scale!  Currently World of Warcraft claims 10Million online subscribers.

Gen Time!

Now that we have the game set up to play, where are we to begin?  We'll first lets have a look at character generation.  We will create a character to play through the game as far as the trial version will allow.  Our character we are creating should be of a good basic design and we should like the character look.  In the case of most MMOs including this one, a great involvement in playing is advancing your character through the game.

  As you quest, explore, and kill your character becomes more powerful.  We will gain experience and become inherently stronger as we level our character, and we will become more competent as we accumulate gear.  

So lets Gen up.  Opening the game we are treated to a great cinematic, then the log in screen.  After logging in I choose to connect with the U.S, since Canada is a close neighbour, and in realm style... Hmm, we have normal and pvp styles.  We will choose normal since we are new, also a friend of mine plays on the Thunderhorn server.  After choosing realm style, we choose the server to play on.  Since the game is so large, the populations are split across many duplicates of the world.   Once in a server, we stay in that server, generally.

Now the character generation screen is up.  First we choose our sex.   Then race.

There are 8 races I am allowed to choose from.

4 races represent the Alliance, 4 represent the Horde!

Alliance roster

1. Human          
2. Dwarf
3. Night Elf
4. Gnome

Horde roster

1. Orc
2. Undead
3. Tauren
4. Troll

I am choosing the Tauren race of the horde as personal preference.  After choosing the race, we can then choose our class, the classes are

• Warrior
• Paladin
• Hunter
• Rogue
• Priest
• Mage
• Warlock
• Druid
• Shaman

Each of these classes has it's own role and value in playing.   I will be choosing warrior, because I'm on a 14day trial, and it's best to keep things simple.  After choosing class you may also adjust your character appearance to a small degree.  Now we have to name our character.  In such a big game finding a good name isn't easy as it may seem.  Since many names are already taken, I'll have to be a bit abstract, so I've come up with the name for my character: OscuroPain.  Which is Spanish (since we are playing a Tauren) for Darkness Pain.  Our character is black, and often primitives use descriptive naming conventions like this, so I figure this is a fitting name.  

We are now finished character generation!