This afternoon, after much thought, I decided that $15 isn’t really all THAT much money anyway, and re-opened my WoW account. Amazing how a month away from a game can make you see every little thing from a new light.

I immediately hopped over to Argent Dawn to make a character in the US chapter of Tamarind’s new blog community guild, Single Abstract Noun. Spent a bit of time ditzing around on a draenei hunter, but decided that I’d played too many draenei, and too many hunters, and that maybe this might be a good chance for me to finally get a gnome above level 15 (and the thought of riding another elephant was making me sick — I’ve never had a mechanostrider before!). And what’s more adorable than a little gnome warrior tanking big giant scary monsters?

So I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to come up with a name for my little gnomeling. The bad part is, this server’s been around since 2004, and anything resembling a good name was taken a long time ago. I was sorting through plant/spice-related names because things like Hazel and Cinnamon sounded good, and I thought maybe Paprika sounded like a good name for a red-haired gnome girl — but then I remembered Tam’s story about his troll named Kumquat, and decided against it. (Though honestly, given it’s a real word, it was probably taken years ago, I didn’t even check.)

So I changed a letter so that it would nickname into something more palatable, and my new gnome warrior Kaprika was born. Though with that letter change, now her name looks like I was going for an alternate spelling of Caprica. Dammit, why does this keep happening to me? First my dwarf rogue, now my gnome warrior. I never even watched that show! It just happens to make a really good character name!

Anyway….

They weren’t kidding about the the neutral mobs changing in the starting areas — I could just run right through those frost trolls, up to their leader, kill him for the loot I needed, then run back out of the cave without any of the trolls bothering me. Not like before, where I had to clear the place until I got to him. And it’s the weirdest thing, I picked up the quest to bring the scalding mornbrew back to the town “before it got cold,” but it doesn’t have a timer on it any more! I could carry that thing in my bags for however long I damn well please! They didn’t even bother to change the quest description so that it’s not telling you to hurry any more!

But overall, I’m really enjoying myself. This is probably just about the best guild I could hope for. Everybody’s off doing their own thing, laughing and chatting and not caring how fast everyone else is progressing, and it feels like you know everybody. What’s more, everyone loves to write and read blogs about the game, so the literacy count is amazingly high. I really hope this guild survives so that years down the road, I can say I was there from the start.