I prefer role-playing or social games, which World of Warcraft definitely is. This post is my first of many upcoming entries about things I specifically think WOW has done well compared to many other RPG’s I’ve played over my lifetime.

This entry is praising the Randomize function when selecting a name for your new character.

The Randomizer is great for brand new folk who haven’t even thought of a name for their character on World of Warcraft, or for those whose primary, secondary and tertiary choices are all taken and who are getting impatient for a name that works. Please note, you’ll want to add a couple of letters after what comes up, or you’ll find the Randomizer names are also taken ;)

Personally, I’ve got a handful of names that I use on Role Playing games online. I’ve been playing offline since 1984 and online since 1991 and have selected names over the years that weren’t common and thus allow me to use them in most all games I play online.

However, sometimes I don’t want to play as “me”, I want to have a completely unknown name, and having played The Sims 2 a lot in the last year, I have recently been reminded of my longing for a name randomizer.

There are flaws in the presence of the Randomizer in that those names will more likely be taken and more likely be common across Realms (yet be different players behind the keyboard, making communication confusing perhaps), but personally I would use the Randomizer to give me ideas for new names. I’m one of those kind of people who likes to put my own twist on things if it isn’t going to bother anyone that I do so.

The Randomizer was great for when I was first checking out the stories of the various races on World of Warcraft - I didn’t have to type a name, I just clicked the Randomizer a few times, added a letter or two to the end of the name that came up, and logged in that way.

I love the World of Warcraft name randomizer!

This is the first time I’ve ever played a Warcraft game, but I’m a long-time player of Role Playing Games in general, so the fundamentals of World of Warcraft already come naturally to me, thankfully.

However, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t confused the first time I tried to log into a Realm on World of Warcraft after I had installed World of Warcraft from the 5 CDs that came with the documentation.

The first thing that confused me was the process of selecting a Realm to create my first character in. For some reason, the game itself selected a Realm that was NOT marked as “full” but there was a LINE UP for logging in! I was put into 82nd position and told I’d be able to log in in about 15 minutes!!

I tried a number of other worlds whose population was marked as “medium” and not full, but I got the same “line up” problem.

Then… I tried a world whose population was already marked as “full” and I logged into the Realm immediately!!

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something… ??

At any rate, once I got into a realm, I found it was a Horde realm so I created my first Avatar in the form of a (female, like me IRL) Troll Hunter, and I logged in.

I actually logged in last night, not this morning, so I was playing at about 8-11PM Central time, and there were a number of other players running around in the city I started up in.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got logged in, someone obviously more experienced with the game than I was started running back and forth and around me, jumping over me and then interacting with me - offering for me to join his party, and then later initiating a duel and when I declined, initiating another one shortly afterwards. Oh, and he also ran around saying “LOL” over and over - and while it’s got a cool sound effect and physical gesture, the “coolness” wears off very quickly when it’s done over and over.

So, even though I had originally accepted the invitation to the party, and even though I accepted and duelled the second time without knowing what I was doing, as soon as I figured out how to, I announced I was leaving the party (/party I’m leaving now, I’m brand new to the game and gotta get used to my interface) and then left it and walked away from LOLman.

Having watched about 2 minutes of the game from my nephew’s house at Christmas, I knew my first “thing to do” (aside from figuring out what button does what command) was to talk to an NPC with a yellow exclamation mark over its head. Thankfully, the game starts you facing the first person you need to talk to.

And this first person gave me a hunting quest right away, oh joy! I was assigned to kill 10 wild boars I believe, so I headed out to do that.

Initially I started fighting with the hand axe that was wielded, and I was doing fine there, but since I’m a Hunter, I was given advice to use my bow since Hunters do a lot of ranging work. It took me a while to figure out how to move my bow onto my quick-action bar and then how to weild it in order to use it, but once I got the hang of it I found I could get three arrows off on my target before their running towards me brought them too close for arrow work and I’d have to switch back to the hand axe.

Unfortunately, the Realm I was in went down an hour or so after I got logged in, and I was forced to create another character on another Realm just to be able to continue playing. The second realm I chose was an Alliance one, so I created a (female) Human Rogue character.

I was pleased to see that I can retain the same name across multiple realms, but I don’t know how the underlying fact of how that works will influence the playability of the game. Maybe it won’t at all!

If you do and you’re looking for some friends in your realm, list your player name and realm name here!

My primary character lives in Zul’jin and is a Troll Hunter. My secondary character lives in Sen’jin and is a Gnome Mage.

I also log into other realms periodically to help collect World of Warcraft Census data through a UI (user interface) add-on.

My game name is Valdesta if you want to see if I’m on your Realm.