Hello all! It’s a real privilege to have been chosen for this and I hope to live up to the opportunity.
It’s been suggested to me that I introduce myself and give you an idea of what kind of player I am and some of my background and history. Hopefully it will help shed some light on where some of my points of view come from and how I approach arriving at some of my suggestions for the game.
I started out in the mid-90s playing MUDs. For those who may be unfamiliar those are “Multi-User Dungeons” or "Multi-User Dungeons and Dragons” MUDD. They are/were old school text based MMORPGs except the first M was not quite so massive… usually just 10 to 200 players playing on a single server at a time. In a nut shell though they played a lot like WoW with a lot of the same character parameters, abilities, leveling, classes, dungeons, bosses etc. except obviously without any graphics O.o.
Eventually after a while I ended up as a developer for the game and coded some gaming systems, classes, races, etc. over the course of a few years and I suppose in the process gained an appreciation for how my decisions as an x-player now dev were suddenly not quite as simple as they once seemed.
Naturally when a friend of mine sat me down at his computer telling me I had to try this “Warcraft game” I was pretty much blown away with it. It was all the stuff I had been playing and coding for the last few years but with graphics! So that was pretty much the end of the line for MUDs for me
I started playing WoW about 6 months after launch. Leveled up a toon and scrapped and clawed my way into convincing my guild leader to start a raiding alliance with a couple other groups of friends and the next thing you know I’m wiping in ZG woohoo! Then I wiped some more in MC, wiped a lot more in BWL and so on and so forth.
I formed a guild and was the GM of that for a while in BC and we raided the BC content and time passed by. Now I’m a member of one of the guilds that I raided with back in vanilla. It’s nice to still have some old WoW friends from back then still around.
The years went by, and I got married, had some kids, got divorced, raised some kids, met someone else, we started raising both our kids; and now I’ve got 4 teenagers, a job, mortgage, responsibility, and my WoW time is somewhat less structured than it could be in the past, to say the least!
In my present WoW life I just finished leveling my 9th 60 alt. They are all basically around the iLvL 210-220 range with my “main” (the toon I’m posting on) being about iLvL 229 as I recall.
I LFR regularly and do it mostly to play the encounters and collect the transmogs. I play a lot of honor PvP BGs and have max honor gear on an Arcane Mage just because the spec is a ton of fun for me this x-pac! I think I got to Knight back in vanilla and peaked out there, the system got the better of me at that point I suppose. I also clear a lot of old content for transmogs and mounts when I don’t have much else to do.
Right now, I’m spending a fair bit of time on the PTR. I’ve been a part of several x-pac Beta tests over the years going back to WotLK and enjoy attempting to provide useful feedback where I can. I don’t tend to post a lot but do post when I have something to say. Perhaps I’ll have to step it up a bit now that it seems I have a bit of a responsibility to do so. If you head over to the PTR forum you can find a few threads and comments there.
See you around I hope!