My First Time: Playing World of Warcraft

So this could possibly be a surprise considering how much of a gamer I've always been, especially for MMORPG games, but I never played World of Warcraft until 1 week ago. The main reason probably being that I played Everquest on and off since it first released so there wasn't much of an interest in playing another game that had a subscription fee involved. Of course there was the trial's available out there and the game was at least somewhat interesting in that it had some interesting game mechanics and so last week being completely bored and doing an all nighter, I decided to give the game a try.

So I first started off how I start most of my games: by doing research. Since my main character in Everquest was a Shadow knight, I was mostly looking at the death knight class but after I while I wasn't all that interested in the way the class seemed to play and it sounded like people complained about the class and it didn't give me the best impression as my first character. The next class that I was interested in was the Rogue, mostly because being a zombie rogue just sounded bad ass so that's what my plan was to do. So since I wanted to actually get into the game, I wasn't going to play the official WoW servers since their trial only lets you get to level 20 and I didn't think that would let me enjoy the game very much, so I went looking for the best private server out there.

After a little bit more of research I decided to try out the private server called Molten WoW. Not knowing anything about WoW and it's expansion packs, I wasn't sure which 'era' was the best for the game so I ended up going with the Wrath of the Lich King version of the server, they also have a Cataclysm server running. After a hefty download for the game client I finally started up the game and made my first character. She ended up being a troll rogue because I think the racial benefits looked better than the undead, but regardless after only getting about 1 level I was already bored. Since I wanted the best WoW experience I could get, I was on the server with regular experience values so that I wouldn't fly through the levels. I decided to do some more class research and got interested in being a Warlock but I decided not to and eventually settled for a Hunter.

For whatever reason I went with an Orc and took my shot at the game again. The game definitely plays differently than Everquest, so that took me a little bit to get use to, but once I got the hang of the combat system it was a fairly easy time. The main problem I had is that I just really had no idea what I was doing. I was doing low level quests and killing and such, but there just felt like so much was unexplained. I didn't even know how to get a pet until I actually looked it up on google. I only got to level 12 so far and it's been an alright experience. The game doesn't seem to be grabbing me like a lot of others have and it seems to have a pretty in-depth system for stats, armor and skills that I'm not all that comfortable trying to learn for myself and also not interested enough to research the game farther for myself. Overall I can see why the game is as popular as it is/was. I didn't actually have any kind of community interaction even though there are thousands of people on this server.

From my first experience I would probably give the game a 3/5. It definitely has some interesting things and looks like it can be enjoyable. It just didn't draw me in yet and didn't have anything to offer to keep me coming back and wanting to play more. I will probably play it a little more before either uninstalling or deciding to really get into it, but for now I'd say it's worth checking out the private server if you want to play the game for free.