while there is a game there, where you kill monsters and take their lunch money and gather eight [Bear Asses] and turn them in to gain the [Gigantic Hammer of E-Peenage]…there’s also a community there, of real people. Good people, bad people, shy people, loud people, young people, old people, in-between people. Never forget that.

And it’s the people that make WoW more than "just a game."

I'm not the most social squid around. I'm a super-super-super introvert, the kind of person who scores 100% I and 0% E on any of those MBTI quizzes. Even if somebody's a good friend, my best friend from high school or college, whatever, hanging out with them 24/7 will start making me antsy around day 3. The one exception is my favorite elf, who (after a decade of cohabitation) I'm pretty used to.

So when I started playing WoW, I wasn't really sure what to make of the social aspects. I avoided grouping with people I didn't know (okay, I still won't PuG), and I really wasn't quite sure how to meet people. How I ended up falling in with a group of hardcore RPers and having WoW make up a very large chunk of my social circle, both when I'm logged in and logged out, remains a bit of a mystery to me.

My friends are men and women — approximately equal amounts of each. (We know a shocking number of couples who play this game together, and oftentimes if one member of a couple quits, it's the guy. Wonder what people who think girls don't game make of that?) They're older than me and younger than me. Parents, childfree, married, single, gay, straight, bi, trans, cis, seriously, we're all over the map. We live in Seattle, Portland, Canada, California, Texas, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, and lots of other places I'm not sure about.

Like any group of people who get together due to a single hobby, we have tons in common and tons that's not in common. Our get-togethers may have the conversation focused on our characters, and yeah, many of us will refer to each other by our in-game names (I will answer to Ovi in RL, and I'm starting to answer to Teu — HA HA! Perhaps this is a sign my former main still has a chance), but it does come down to the fact that it's a social circle I'm quite happy to be a part of, introvert or no.

I spend nine hours a week in a 25-person conference call, a situation I'd never have imagined myself in before I started playing WoW. (True story: I was called for jury duty a couple years back. The room I sat in while we waited to go in for selection contained exactly 40 people. I stared at it, kind of dumbfounded, and realized that that was a.) more people than there were at my wedding [38], and b.) it took that many people to run Molten Core. I felt a bit faint.) It's a heck of a group activity, and the fact that I don't see many of these people face-to-face doesn't mean that I don't feel like I know them. And, amusingly, they know me. (Last year's birthday wishes included virtual sheep and chocolate and yarn.)

In some of the other parts of my online life, there's been strife and frustration and grief and fighting, a lot of people behaving like total gits and a lot of people who are just trying to stay sane amidst the crapstorm. While it might be stretching matters to say we're all sane in the WoW group, it's going to be nice to be in a "room" full of people who know who our friends are and who our enemies are, which is to say:

Sarth+3, your days are numbered. Start counting down. Don't start high.

If your "alt" gets to go raiding while your "main" only gets brought in to buff the raid with Spirit (and only then when the disc priest is out sick), you may have a new main.

If you have to change your screen name from your "main" to your "alt" on your raiding board so people will know who the heck you are, you may have a new main.

If the new expansion comes out and your "alt" hits 80 before your "main" hits 71, you may have a new main.

If you're still not sure what the 51-point talents for your "main" are, let alone what they do, you may have a new main.

If your "alt" hits 450 cooking, fishing, and first aid before your "main" even sees a scrap of Frostweave — even though she's a tailor — you may have a new main.

If your "main" is wearing heirloom items she got from your "alt", you may have a new main.

If you roll a second version of your "alt" so she can level up side-by-side with the toon she leveled 1-70 with (in other words, you have a second version of your "alt" purely for RP reasons), you may have a new main.

And, most relevant today,

If you get absurdly, ridiculously excited over registering and setting up a domain and email address which are 100% associated with something your "alt" once said… but you have absolutely no urge to register a domain for your "main", even though you can think of the perfect domain name¹, you may have a new main.

I no longer try to deny that Teuthida (and not Ovistine) is my main, but it was a long time before I could admit it! At first, I called her my "raiding main" (Ovistine was still my "RP main"). But at this point, I've put as much thought into Teu's backstory as Ovi's, and I've rolled a second Teu in order to play her with her companion Valyrie.

It's funny that it wasn't hard to admit this before. My first main was Agnesdea, a human priest who now lives on Sisters of Elune. I was happy to make Ovistine my main; this was back in the days when being a dwarf priest mattered a lot to a raiding team. Not only that, I'd gotten into some lovely RP with the foremost dwarven guild on my server, so Ovi had plenty to do! At first I didn't think I had too many priests (Agness stayed shadow, Ovi was Disc/Holy), but eventually — and especially with the upcoming dual-spec ability — Agness got re-rolled as a warlock. I'm perfectly happy with that.

But I do miss the twirly braids sometimes. In fact, when hairdressers came in, I took Teu to a barbershop and got her as close to braids as I could get (pigtails). I'm pretty sure twirly braids add a significant amount to healing, and pigtails come close.

At any rate, welcome to SandwichRations.com! I'm pretty thrilled to have this domain set up. And if I end up with a new main sometime in the future… well, she'll have to learn to pack picnic baskets, that's all.

^1: "twirlybraids.com"

These days, Anna keeps posting Friday Five posts and I keep wanting to write things, and I never end up doing it. And there are all kinds of things I want to babble excitedly about. So what the heck — I'll give it another go, and if I don't post much, well, you can catch more activity from me on my knitting blog or my review blog. Because I totally believe in the value of compartmentalizing!