Not These Idiots Again

Have you ever had that situation where you exit/logout from a video game in a certain location and when you login again you forget what you were doing?

Yeah, that's been happening to me quite a bit with this project of mine.

I'd swear I've seen this thing before...

Oh, right.

With only a certain number of starting zones, I've found myself doing repeat work in most locations. That's not a bad thing per se, but I do lose track of which toon has done what thing when I login to one. The easiest solution to this issue is to simply concentrate on few toons to level, but I know that will tempt me more toward accelerating my leveling, and I don't want that at all. 

I suppose I could simply write down "to do" lists for each toon, but that seems kind of silly. This isn't that important, after all, just an annoyance.

Anyhoo, here's the current status of Operation Spread the Love:

As of December 17, 2024.

Again, the Shaman doesn't fit into the loading screen without me scrolling down, so I left him off, but he's at L14 as well.

As an aside, I play that Shaman when I'm not logged into Battle.Net, because he's my "I'm going to go hide and play for a while" toon. However, one disturbing thing happened last night. While I was logged into my Shaman for a bit before bed, I was heading back toward The Crossroads when I got a sudden group invite by a player name I'd never seen before. I figured it was a random thing so I rejected it. Then I got a whisper from the toon: 

"I see you."

I quickly did a /who and discovered they were an L26 Hunter. I then checked Battle.Net, and none of my friends from BNet were logged in as this toon. After verifying that I was not visible via BNet, I swtiched over to my Alliance bank toon and verified that they were all logged in on Alliance toons.

Who was it? Hell if I know, but I did go back and check to see if I'd accidentally made the Shaman's name visible at some point on the blog, but nope. Not there. And whomever it was had already gotten ahead of me to L26, which is well beyond the level cap for a "Free Account", so if it was one of them that meant they were spending a very unhealthy amount of time playing on these Classic Fresh servers. I mean, they're all in the mid-upper L30s to the mid-upper L40s, so yeah.... That's a lot of time spent in-game.*

The L24 toon is an alt. Their main is in the
upper 30s/low 40s. That player also raids Naxx
twice a week, BWL and MC once a week, and
the occasional AQ40, so that's why they're not higher.

As I alluded to above, my friends are all far ahead of me in the leveling process, even the slowest of them is in the low-mid L30s on their main toon, and plenty of them already have alts that are higher than my brood of toons. That suits me fine, because I'm actually leveling at a lower speed than I thought I would. Either that or they're going faster than I expected.

I originally thought that they would get to L40 --and a mount-- before I got to L20. Well, most of my friends got to L40 (not all of them have mounts yet), and I'm not even at L15 yet. My prediction may eventually hold, but they might all be at L50 before I hit L20 with my stable of toons. 

***

It's kind of funny, but if I had tried to do this in Retail WoW, I would have actually had to put in a lot more effort at slowing down my leveling than I put in actually leveling in Classic Fresh. That may go against what you'd expect, because process of leveling does require me to exert effort, but Blizzard has spent so much time and development at making it so easy to get to max level in Retail that you have to be creative if you want to NOT level that fast. As it is, I've had to be creative enough to slow myself down in the Anniversary servers, and that's in an environment in which the Journey is the main selling point of the game. Imagine trying to do this in an environment where "The Game Begins At Endgame" is the driving focus.

You need a beard, Steve. And red hair.
From all over the internet.

*I should point out that my Questing Buddy has informed me that her new guild that she is going to raid with already has groups spamming Stratholme and Upper Blackrock Spire dungeons, so they've got enough max-level toons in the guild already to accomplish that. That's... kind of nuts, as that's at the speed of my leveling experience as a Leveling Shaman in TBC Classic.