John Martin

I've done all of the above. Plus:

- On my first toon, I didn't realize that 1 silver = 100 copper. When I gathered over 99 copper, I didn't notice the silver, and thought I had gone from 90-something back down to 5 or so. I thought I had been pick-pocketed and /yelled "Thanks to whoever stole my money!"

- Same first Night Elf, around level 8 or so I was exploring, fell off of Teldrassil completely, and couldn't figure out how to get back. I didn't know about spirit healers yet, and to make matters worse, I had fallen halfway down onto a "branch" then died, so it was really difficult to find my body.

- Chatting during my first duel. "No wait, slow down!"

- Accidentally wandering into the Barrens.

- Accidentally wandering into Feralas

- My second toon was a hunter. I knew nothing about training pets, or for that matter controlling them (other than sending them out). The grind to 20 was slow before I finally gave up. (That was a night elf 18 months ago. Now my main's a Tauren hunter).

I hit 65 just in time to be invited by our guild to make a go at Ring of Blood. My experience was mixed:

Got there and there were about 10 of us Horde, and 10 Alliance.

At first everything was good, Horde and Alliance seemed to be taking turns turning in and starting battles, we were all helping each other across faction lines.

Then some jackass Alliance started camping the quest giver and started battles for them over and over, so fast that we couldn't even talk to the quest giver.

I couldn't tell, but it seemed (by the random order of the boss, the same people tanking over and over, etc) like either they were having a lot of problems with everyone being on the same boss at the same time, if they didn't realize that they could all get credit if they did the same one, or if they were purposely messing with us. The same group of 10 was doing boss #4, boss #2, boss #5, boss #1, boss #2, etc...

So we couldn't even catch the quest giver in time to turn in our previous battle, let alone start our next one. After about 15 of their battles in a row, we all mounted our kodos and sat on the quest giver. It didn't make it impossible for them to camp the quest giver, but slowed them down to the point where we could at least progress a little. Still by then most of the group had to get to sleep, so we left unfinished.

Oh well, we still had fun, and it was awesome watching those bosses fall no matter who was fighting.

This is a very good idea WoW Insider. *Very* good. I'm looking forward to this.

I was *broke* when I reached Outland, having just bought my epic mount. I walked in with less than 4 gold, which was depressing because I couldn't even buy profession upgraded.

Early on I thought I was going to switch one of my professions to Engineering someday, so I had stashed away any jems and metal bars I came across. When BC came out I sold half my jems and made about 100g within a few hours.

I have a confession to make.

I'm Horde on a PVE server. Late one night, around 3am, I was doing the Borrov quest. Me and 3 friends camped across the road overlooking the Alliance camp. A dozen Alliance were everywhere, and I just knew as soon as we were flagged they'd attack. I went ahead, kited him across the road into the hills where we pummeled the crap out of him. To my amazement no Alliance came over to kill us. Wow, they didn't take advantage of the situation!

When I got back to The Bulwark there was flagged Gnome standing next to two players who weren't flagged. By then it was 4am, I was half asleep, and the non-flagged looked like undead, and it looked like the Ally was taunting them. My instant reaction was kill on sight. As I let my first shot go off I realized they were all Alliance here to do their version of the Barrov quest, but by then it was too late - I was flagged, everyone started fighting. Over the next hour a bunch of us fought it out, dying, rezzing, killing, dying... A few times they tried desperately killing Barrov while we fought, which of course was way too much. In the end more Horde stopped to help, and the Alliance gave up with a half dozen of us surrounding Barrov like body guards.

I felt kind of bad since the Alliance didn't bother us, and in return I screwed up their quest. But once the fighting started, we couldn't stop. Sorry guys.

So I'm relatively new to live-at-60, having leveled up my first 60 about a month ago. I'm still barely understanding the order that (pre TBC) end-game instances can be done - BRD, LBRS, Strat, Scholo, DM, UBRS, Onyxia, MC, AQ20, ZG, AQ40, Nax... maybe I have that wrong though).

From what my feeble brain can comprehend, besides attunement, keys, and group-play experience, a lot of that order is gear dependent (i.e.: you need FR gear found from BRD-through-UBRS to do Onyxia).

I'm probably not the only person wondering how these new instances will fit in with the pre-TBC end-games. For example, will we need drops from AQ40 in order to do Hellfire Citadel?

I'm going to go at midnight to pick up my reserved copy (and my wife's reserved copy), mainly to see what kind of circus atmosphere it will be. But I'm not going to stay up all night - I'm going to go home, install it, maybe poke my head in Outland and see how many people are there, maybe get to the first town, maybe check out the vendors, pick up a few kill quests to see how difficult it is... well, maybe I will be up all night.

I don't know if anyone has talked about this bug, but this has happened to me and a few people: While in an instance I've linked an item that dropped to someone outside the instance, and have gotten immediately disconnected.

I've also had the disappearing frame issue. So was half our raid in UBRS last night, yet we still managed to somehow take down Lord Valthalak. :)

This was quite a shocker when I first did this. I took the ride, not knowing what was going to happen. When I was flying I was like "ooooh petty" then *splat* - death. And yet I didn't learn my lesson, I tried 4-5 times without success. It was pretty funny to see the dozens of skeletons around the target and know I wasn't the only one to die doing this :)

There are a thin lines connecting industry and corrupt politicians. One of them is tax.

Nike moves in to SL and gets taxed for land use and don't like it. Their virtual clothing industry association's lobbyists pay election contributions to congressman or senator xyz, and suddenly there's tax exemption on virtual clothes.

Man, I left RL to escape this. Where do I go next?