Since World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade came out last week, my friends and family have seen little of me, unless it's been online slaying beasties.
I'm on the Hyjal server with my guild from EverQuest, Inner Loop (you'll notice our guild mentioned on the credits for Warcraft 3). This was a guild that was basically made up of only the people we knew personally, hence the name. Later, we opened up membership to those that we played with in game, and started having some guild activities outside of the game. There have been trips to Las Vegas, hikes up Yosemite, and of course large group dinners and weddings to attend.
Last night, Nerol made level 70 -- he has been playing almost nonstop for the last week or so to finish those last ten levels. (I'm sure he must have napped at some point) He is not the first level 70 on our server -- as of this writing, there are around 50 level 70s logged in at this moment on Hyjal on the Horde side, which means there's likely twice that number on the Alliance side.
As for my pair of blood elves, they hit level 30 last night, after 4 days of playing time and 9 days of playing time. At some point next week, I should be level 40, and have my horse. There are some blood elves that are already getting close to 70 -- the work of players on rotation and high level characters aiding them. One of the things surprising to me in this is that Blood Elf newbie content abruptly ends at level 20, where they shunt you out to the pre-expansion world, meaning that from level 21 to level 57, you are doing everything a non-expansion player can do. There's nowhere new to access -- no new areas until 58, when the Outland becomes available. However, sprinkled about the old-world areas are new NPCs with new quests, and new rewards -- the presence of which are pretty welcome considering the situation with the Auction House.
The Auction House within WoW is for players to exchange their items for other players' gold. WoW has a bunch of tradeskills in which to create other items, but larger still is the amount of items being randomly generated by the server as prizes for killing monsters. Auctions run for anywhere from 2 hours to 24 hours, and the auction length time is given as vague, and slightly extends randomly the length of the auction when items are bid upon, ensuring that the WoW auction remains slightly sniper free. With the release of the expansion pack, many players who had been hoarding gold are now spending it quite freely, inflating the prices of equipment well beyond the means of players who are actually at the level that the equipment can be used. Paladin usable equipment (chain mail and weapons) are the worst inflated of them all, so much so that I would rather run around in quest equipment and monster drops than spend my gold in the Auction House.
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