I'm debating joining WoW

[John]

I'd say just do 1 month until you know how much you like the game.

Burning Crusade is set for Q4, but cross-server battlegrounds will be in the next major patch, 1.12, which will probably be sometime in August.

[Dave]

Big question:

Are there expansions and whatnot I have to buy, or can I go get the game and be done with it?

With Galaxies I had to purchase two add-on expansions and I was disappointed with the second one.

[Cauton]

At the moment there are no expansions out for WoW. There is one in the works, but that won't be out for quite some while.

[John]

WoW is far from EverQuest.  Unlike SOE, who releases an expansion every six months on top of their "adventure packs", Blizzard releases an asston of free content for WoW.  Several raid dungeons and a couple of regular dungeons have seen themselves come in for free since WoW's release.

Like Cauton said, The Burning Crusade is coming in Q4, a ways away.

[Iolaus]

Well I resigned up. Created a bunch of characters on Norgannon. Suprisingly a bunch of the names I use were taken. But in any case my guy is an undead mage named Radoria.

[Dade]

Awesome...give us tells in game.

Daggerstrike is Kossuth
Darkrider is Skullflower
I'm Miakis and Omak.

[Iolaus]

It literally took me 10-15 minutes to download their one complete 460 meg patch. And then they had two small patches after that. So you should be playing real quick if you grab the game. The game is quite cheap too. 30-40 if I remember correctly.

[Iolaus]

What time do you guys normally play around? I in particular we play at sporadic times since I'm in college, and am taking Summer Courses and working.

[Dade]

Right there with you, brother. I'm usually on pretty irregularly, but show up in the afternoon/evening hours Pacific Time.

[Dave]

That's another thing...

What's the population like around the hours of midnight-4am Pacific?

/very close to just not playing SWG even though I still have time left on my account

[Ryos]

I personally don't have much of a problem finding parties late at night and I'm on the least horde-friendly server out there.  Though you do run into quite a few people less in capital cities and whatnot, but mostly that just means less lag. :P

[Dade]

Usually if I'm on that late it's not terribly difficult to find a party for an instance....at least an instance that a LOT of people run. The Wailing Caverns in the Barrens are a prime example; late at night it's pretty easy to find a group, but if you try to find one for say....Shadowfang Keep? Eh, not quite so easy.

Norgannon is still a pretty new server (only maybe 5 months or so old....if that) but we've seen the population and economy change quite a bit since our first couple days there.

Any ideas so far, Davey, on what side you're more interested in playing? I think you're a Horde man myself.....but then again....maybe you're a gnome kinda guy. Oh wait that's Mark.

[Dave]

My subscription to Galaxies runs out tomorrow.

I don't even know what sides there are, Todd. :P I have literally no idea about the game!

I'm trying to convince my buddy Ryan and his brother (and said brother's wife) to swtich servers before I jump in.

What's the RPing like? Or is there any? (There sure wasn't any in Galaxies.)

[Dade]

There are two factions....Horde and Alliance.

The Alliance consists of Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves.
The Horde is Orcs, Tauren (giant cow-like people), Trolls, and the Undead.

As for RPing...that's basically down to server type. There're Player versus Enemy/Mob, Player Versus Player, Role Play, and RP-PVP servers.

Norgannon is a plain PVE server and seriously, probably the easiest server type to start the game on.

[D-Rider]

There are servers specifically dedicated to role players.

Ours ain't one of them. :P

EDIT:  Beaten to teh punch!