I was playing World of Warcraft pretty regularly, early last year. I had the game installed on a Windows partition on my laptop but I completely loathe booting XP, so as time went on, I was playing less and less till I eventually stopped altogether, though keeping my account active.

Tonight I finally got off my ass and installed WoW in Ubuntu, my preferred Linux OS of Doom. It was one of those things I knew was possible, but I was too lazy to take on the task. I followed this howto and after about thirty minutes, hosing the X server a good six or seven times, I finally got WoW running on my laptop. At first, I had no sound, but after manually incresing the sound buffer to 250, I was completely set. The result is awesome. Warcraft runs perfectly on Ubuntu using just Wine. The only thing I notice is that it does not play nicely with Beryl, but it’s simple to switch the window manager over to metacity. I actually hotkeyed the switch, so it’s even simpler.

Considering that I now no longer have to boot the dreaded Windows to play, I’ll probably be logged in a lot more. This could be a good or bad thing, considering how completely addicting it is.

This South Park episode about World of Warcraft has to be my most favorite episode ever.

This past weekend, I bit the bed-rail and picked up a copy of World of WarCraft. Having been a moderate EverQuest and EQ2 junkie, I’d thought I quit the MMORPG habit cold, but after seeing some statistics stating that over fifty percent of the MMORPG players worldwide are on WoW, I decided to give it a try. It seems the numerous weekends spent chained to a computer, fingers nervously twitching from an overdose of caffeine, nicotine and sleep deprivation while farming beasts to improve my leather-working skills was just not enough for me.

As with EQ, the install and initial update took well over an hour to finish and the monthly account fee is the same fifteen bucks I could be donating to save some village of crippled, blind children in Africa, but hey…I’m already going to Hell anyway.

In EQ, my main was a Wood-Elf Druid and I really got to liking the soloing capabilities of that class, so in keeping with tradition, I chose a Night-Elf Druid to be my first character. The huge Minotaur-like Tauren, Trolls, Orcs and Undead were really appealing since I generally like to keep it evil, but I decided to stick with what I know, at least for now. I’ve played Druids for about two years and I know that class’s place, alone or in groups pretty down-pat. Tree-hugger, I am not, but I know what I know.

I was very surprised to see how very similar WoW is to EQ2. The gameplay and mechanics are in many ways nearly the same. You’d think someone at Sony would’ve sued by now. Maybe they have or perhaps Sony ripped off someone else first—I’ve no idea, but the similarities had me up and running right away, killing and running all over the place.

The only real differences I see—aside from the basic stuff like graphics, races and zones is that questing seems to be better set up in WoW. I rarely finished any quests in EQ, but over the course of the weekend, I’d managed to get something over twenty complete quests under my belt in WoW. In a matter of a few hours (I did get some sleep), I managed to work my way up to level 12.

I missed MMORPGs. There’s a reason EQ was dubbed EverCrack. I’m not sure what the slang for WoW would be…”WarCrack”? I’m not sure how long I’m willing to invest in playing WoW, but for now, I’m all about it. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop me a /tell. My main’s name is Abbath (ripped straight from the Norwegian Black Metal gods, Immortal) on the Anvilmar server.