Northrend! It's here! And it's . . . already populated with 80s?!

I've been working at leveling my druid since the release. I quest with my girlfriend (a hunter), and we've been breezing through zones. Borean Tundra? Check. Dragonblight? Check. Grizzly Hills? Check. . . well, almost. We hit 75 tonight, but I can't help but feel that we're still falling behind. The big horde guild on our server whacked out Naxx this afternoon (the "big" alliance guild is a joke comparitively. . . it makes me a little sad), and I can't help but feel that I'm missing the leveling curve and won't even have the chance at 25 mans. Not that I'll be doing a lot of them, but I would like to have the opportunity there to not take if I choose. I don't want to be locked out of them because I was just too late.

But then again, as I look around at everyone else leveling, I don't see many people over 73 or so. Tons of people in Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. Not so many in Icecrown and Zul'Drak. So maybe there is hope after all. I see bloggers posting about hitting 71 and 72. I see lots of tips on how to make enough money to afford training - which at 15-20g per spell per level isn't cheap, but not outrageous - and I see gearing guids for leveling. In my mind though, whatever gear you had on you when your soft little feet hit the beaches of Normand. . . I mean Northrend is plenty to carry you through until the quest rewards replace them. Instances drop ludicrously powered gear for how hard they are to do. Quests give 5-10g per, and that's more than enough to cover repairs and training. Hell, I even got myself a genuine [Repair-o-Mount] almost right off the bat and I haven't really missed the cold, hard cash.

I guess the best I can hope for is to just level through Northrend at the pace that I want to, and see what's waiting for me when I hit the level cap (again :) ). I've been getting enough cobalt to fuel a small army, so that's exactly what I'm doing with it. I've hit the point where I need saronite with both engineering and blacksmithing, used the crappy green armor from the blacksmithing to fuel my enchanting, and sent the extra ore off the be prospected into shiny new gems that get sold on the auction house for obscene amounts of gold.

All-in-all, I'm very happy with how things are going. I just don't want to get to the end of leveling and find out that if I had taken my time and leveled all my characters together I would have been just as well off. So here's to you, Blizzard. For another great piece of interactive video entertainment. And if you ever have a job opening, I'm very good at fetching coffee. . . .

Low Population Servers: Pros and Cons

I decided last night to level engineering on my warrior. I know - I must be mad to level engineering, especially this close to an expansion release. The truth is that it's an upgrade to him. His professions before were skinning/herbalism and I don't have a leatherworker, so I figured that dropping skinning for something productive couldn't hurt.

I already have a miner (well, one maxed, and one in the 250ish range) so getting the materials to level it isn't that big of a pain.

I didn't last too long before that idea was thoroughly purged from my mind. I was at about 200 engineering when I couldn't find enough stone from the minerals I was getting to make the blasting powder in the quantity I need. So I went to the auction house to just buy the extra I needed. This is when I started cursing my lower population server. There were exactly 0 of the stones I needed up for sale.

Now don't get me wrong - normally I love not having to fight over every single herb and mineral. I love being able to complete quests without having to push and shove my way to the front of the line to talk to a quest giver, or wait for hours to kill X of a particular thing in an area.

But when I can't get something on the auction house because there just aren't any, or I can't find someone to craft something because the person who got that rare drop recipe hasn't been on in a couple weeks, it makes me feel helpless about the situation. Sure, I can go farm up the stuff I need to level engineering; that isn't a big problem. But what about when I want someone to make me a meta gem that's only a world drop? How do I get something that I can't go out and farm myself? A more ethereal quality to the problem is getting groups. There are times I feel like pugging (I know, but I consider it my charity work for the year) and I can't get a group. Even on my tank or healer.

The whole point of having a MMORPG is the MMO part of that. Massively Multiplayer Online. So supposedly, I should be able to play with hundreds or thousands (or more!) people at once. And they can be across the world from me. But low population servers, whether they serve multiple nations or not, don't deliver on the most important part of the title: Massively. We can tell it's the most important because it's the first word of the genre. And because it's the only thing that makes it different than, oh, Final Fantasy XXVII or whatever the next big console RPG is.

I'm not sure how to combat this. Do you trade the convenience of being able to do what you want when you want for the ease of obtaining tradeskills? This isn't a problem for me most of the time, but when it is a problem, it gets severely frustrating very fast.

I'm hoping we can see some improvements to this with WotLK with people returning to the game for ZOMG NEW CONTENTS AND STUFF, but what's the sustainable answer to low population servers? The current band-aid of high server->low server transfers apparently isn't working, and I don't think I can afford hundreds of dollars to transfer all my siblings characters somewhere else.