Getting WoW running was straightforward. I installed the Nvidia 3d drivers via the System/Administration/Additional Drivers menu, installed some build tools like this:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

I then downloaded the latest wine, compiled and installed it. I copied my .wine-wow directory from my old laptop and ran the launcher.

So there I was, in the newly revamped Tauren starting area with my fresh new paladin. I thought about going to WoW-Pro and using their guide as I’ve done in the past (their guide seems to have become an addon). I decided I’d pass on the guide and just follow the storyline since I was also interested in the new lore.

It turns out that you really don’t need a guide to level from 1-60 any more. The quests come in bundles, and there are plenty of breadcrumbs to follow from one quest hub to the next. If you get lost and confused, you can always go back to your capital city and find the new quest board. This quest board presents one or two quests which will point you to the right zone for the level you’re on.

While you’re in the capital city, I suggest you do the two daily cooking and fishing quests (one of each). The XP scales with level, they’re easy to do, and you get some nice rewards (to be used at level cap in the case of cooking).

Really, you don’t need a guide for azeroth leveling. The quest hubs progress, one to the next and most of the quest objectives are a short distance from the hubs. When you complete the quests in an area, you get a quest to go to the next area. The map now includes the quest objectives, like quest-finder used to.

The story is pretty interesting too. You get to see the motivations and thoughts of some faction leaders, and you get to see a bit of history on how your faction got to where it is. I wish more lore was intertwined into the quests, but it’s a big improvement over the old leveling quests.

Azeroth quests started running dry (or green) for me at level 58, unless I wanted to visit Silithus. I wasn’t interested in the bug-zone, so I went straight to outland. I don’t regret it. I’m about two thirds of the way through hell-fire peninsula and I’m at level 62. The early quests in outland seem to give a bit less XP then the same quests in Azeroth, so if you want true efficiency you may want to continue leveling in Azeroth until you run out of quests.

My play time to level 62 is currently 3 days and 6 hours spread over about two weeks. I would be leveling even faster, but I’m trying to keep my crafting in-line with my level so I don’t have a huge crafting grind later. I’ve probably “wasted” 12 hours mining, skinning, fishing, and cooking.

So go out there and level! You’ll be surprised how easy it is without a guide.

Of all the MMO’s I’ve played, WoW has the smoothest interface and the most customisability. You can tell that the developers have spent a lot of time tuning the interface to make it easy. The quests are well designed if a little boring, and the graphics are adequate. There are very few obvious bugs.

Population:

There are good and bad aspects of having a large population. We’ve all seen the bad; random duel requests, asshats in instances, node camping, etc. The good part is that you are more likely to find a group of people whom you mesh with. Many folks claim that WoW’s population is dumb. I disagree. There are many smart folks playing. One doesn’t have to go any farther then the elitist jerks site to find smart people (with too much time on their hands). And contrary to the title, most of the posters aren’t jerks.

So I’m back to WoW with a 60 day game card, and I’m leveling a Tauren Paladin named Mheh on Velen. Say hi if you see me. I’ve written about shaman gearing in the past. Maybe I’ll come up with some stuff for paladins.

World of Warcraft is a fun game with nice well developed progression. The leveling quests are interesting the first time through, and the raids are complex enough to offer a nice challenge for a few weeks. Dying in WoW is almost completely consequence free. The mechanics are simple enough that a ten year old can play fairly well, but complex enough that theory-crafting can improve how you play considerably. Initially, WoW has a very low ramp. You are presented with a few basic skills and the simplest of quests in a very safe area. Sadly even at endgame, there are a few accepted options for each class of character. If you see two pre-raid resto shamans, they will probably be wearing almost the same gear. Crafting in WoW is very simplistic. Gather mats, know the recipe, make the item (most of the time). Gathering mats is as simple as flying around looking for nodes or monsters.

EVE is almost completely class free for a new character. There is no leveling as such. You train skills and earn cash. There are several parallel progressions in EVE. The skills advance as time goes by. You earn ISK, and you buy or otherwise aquire better gear. One can also rise in the ranks of a corporation or alliance. As time passes for the new character they will probably focus on one area; combat, research, industry, mining… This specialization doesn’t preclude someone who has been a miner for years from training into combat.

If you’re new to the game, life is very harsh. There is a lot to learn in what seems to be a short time, and there are plenty of people out there that prey on new players. After the tutorials, there are no bread crumbs to lead you to the next step (unless you’re a combat pilot. In that case, there is the epic mission arc). Outside the very basics, everything else will probably be a complete mystery. It’s like the real world only without mommy and daddy or schools to point you in some direction. Well, that’s not completely true. There are corporations which help newbies along. There are sources of info on the web. There are friendly knowledgeable people in rookie and NPC corp chat, but there isn’t much hand holding upfront.

If you manage to get past those initial weeks of being lost and confused, you will probably run into pirates and griefers who enjoy making your life difficult. You will also realize that combat and dying have real consequences. You will lose your ship. You will get podded and lose your precious implants. If you are not paying attention, you can also lose weeks or months of training if you die without an up to date clone. It’s harsh. It’s all so very harsh. At this point, it may seem like EVE is made to reward those who lie and backstab and murder the most.

There are lots of ways to cut down on being the victim of pirates or griefers or scammers. If you’re willing to do a little research and be smart, life gets a lot easier. Just like real life, there is always some risk of being a victim though.

There is a light in all of this darkness though. EVE has a satisfyingly complex progression for almost everything. Skills show off this complexity well. For instance, to fly a cruiser, you need a fairly short list of skills and they don’t need to be trained very long. To effectively fly a cruiser, you need a much longer list of skills, and this list of skills will change depending on the purpose of the cruiser. A vexor requires good drone skills, good armor tank skills and moderate gunnery skills. A caracal requires good shield tank skills and good missile skills. This complexity of progression can be overwhelming, but it also means that a character has a lot of flexibility in choosing a path to being an expert.

The number of main professions in EVE is pretty amazing. One can be a mission runner (like me), a researcher, a manufacturer, miner, explorer, pirate, anti-pirate, etc. One can also specialize into some of the more gang/fleet friendly professions like forward scout, ECM specialist, or sniper. There are also combinations of professions which work out well.

The crafting system in EVE is as complex as anything else in the game. Each class of items requires different skills and different materials to create. One can do research on their blueprints to make them more efficient either in materials or time. One can also use the invention system to attempt to upgrade the item a blueprint can be used to make. Evelopedia has a good article on industry.

The market/trade system is very robust. There isn’t a centralized market. You can sell your item from whatever station you happen to be in, but someone has to go haul that item to wherever they are. There are buy orders, sell orders, margin buy orders, and special contracts. Prices will vary depending on where you are in the universe. Sometimes, prices will be drastically different just a few jumps away. This makes the trader/currier profession potentially lucrative. Here is a great article on trading.

At the end of the day, the reason I prefer EVE over WoW, at least for now, is that there is so much freedom and so many areas of the game to explore. For good and bad, it’s also a lot like real life because of this freedom. There is danger and opportunity everywhere. It’s what I imagine the wild west was like in 19th century America.

I won’t go into detail on how to run wine as there are plenty of web sites which will help you with this. I will give some tips about some of the issues I’ve run into which aren’t necessarily covered in the install guides at WineHQ or other support sites. I currently run wine 1.1.15. This version needs to be compiled from scratch since it’s not part of any distribution yet. It’s not hard to do and WineHQ has good instructions. Ubuntu 8.10 comes with a fairly new wine, so if you’re looking for something which works out of the box, that’s a serviceable choice.

Who should run games on linux? If you’re a sysadmin, or are comfortable with the command line in a linux environment, then you have a good shot at success. If you’re new to linux, you’re probably in for a steep learning curve. The instructions at WineHQ are complete in many cases, but they will seem arcane to the uninitiated.

ATI Video cards: I always had many problems in the past when I tried to use wine with ATI video cards. In the past, the 3D support has been pretty poor for linux. Judging from the comments on WineHQ, the situation hasn’t changed much up to now. I have had good luck with Nvidia cards.

WineHQ: On WineHQ, there is a tab at the top of the page labeled “AppDB”. You can browse this section to find info about whatever you may want to run under wine. The search also seems to work well. Use this to look at the various application entries and comments about various problems and fixes.

Ventrilo: I’ve had some issues getting ventrilo to consistently run well. My guild in WoW and my Corp in EVE both use vent, so I have to suffer through. I’ve had the best luck with OSS set under winecfg. This is probably why I have to disable sound in WoW. I suspect I’ll have to do the same with EVE. With ALSA set, I get the event sounds, but no voice under Vent. I’ll update this when I get ALSA working properly. Push to talk works for me if I enable “Use Direct Inut to detect Hotkey”.

WoW: For me, this has worked mostly out of box for a long time. Follow the instructions on the WineHQ AppDB site and you should be good to go.

EVE Online: The classic content linux client from the EVE Online site worked fine for me. This is being discontinued when the next expansion comes out, so I’ll talk about the premium client. The install seems to work fine. Occasionally, the splash screen will pop up and the game won’t start. I have to kill the process when this happens. Up to now, the premium client locked up frequently if sound was enabled. I read on a forum that disabling hardware acceleration fixes that. I’ll try that tonight and update this post if it works. EVE without sound is ok, but I’d like to get it working. Again, if you follow all of the instructions at WineHQ, things should mostly work.

We had a few interesting loot happenings last night. Well, they’re interesting from my perspective. All of the mages were rolling on what looked like healer gear with MP5. I thought this was bad manners in the past, but all of them are rolling, so I can only assume that mp5 is an important stat for mages. We had a poorly geared warlock join us for the first time. From 8 bosses, he needed on 5 pieces of gear and got them. His choices didn’t impact my upgrades, but I’m sure some drama will develop over this incident. The first problem I see was that the raid leaders didn’t put any boundaries on this player. The second problem is that he’s greedy. Well, stuff happens. I’m looking forward to the fallout.

There are several things in this fight that everyone has to pay attention to. First, you must get out of the blizzard. The damage piles up, and once you’re caught in the blizzard, it slows you so it’s harder to get out. In our group, we let the tank eat the blizzards so he didn’t have to move Sapp around and kill folks with tail swipe. During the air phase, everyone needs to spread out, wait for the 2 ice blocks, and then go hide behind one. The frost breath that happens soon after will one-shot you. If you took the cleanse talent, you’ll probably have to help with life drain. It needs to be cleansed as soon as possible as it not only does damage, but t heals Sapphiron.

The caster loot was limited to the Circle of Life. I passed, as our other shaman was replacing a blue ring and mine are as good as this one. The Helmet of the Inner Sanctum drops here, but we didn’t see it this time.

We did 3 attempts at Kel’Thuzad, but didn’t get him down. We got past the adds, but the ice blocks were our downfall. We’ll probably get that fight down next week.

Alliance Vanguard
Revered
Lordaeron’s Resolve

Horde Expedition
Revered
Warsong Stormshield

The Items from Kalu’ak are starter items and should be replaced quickly… except for the cool fishing pole of course.
The Kalu’ak
Honored
Cuttlefish Tooth Ringmail
Revered
Totemic Purification Rod

There is no tabard for instance rep grinding, and the quest line to start getting Hodir rep is long. I assume this will be a requirement in raid guilds as things mature, much like the shoulder enchants from Aldor and Scryer were in BC.
The Sons of Hodir
Honored
Lesser Inscription of the Crag
Lesser Inscription of the Storm
Revered
Giant-Friend Kilt (leather)
Exalted
Greater Inscription of the Crag
Greater Inscription of the Storm

Outside Naxx, mail belts are hard to come by. I would consider the one from Ebon Blade rep.
Knights of the Ebon Blade
Honored
Dark Soldier Cape
Exalted
Kilt of Dark Mercy
Belt of Dark Mending (cloth)

Argent Crusade
Revered
Battle Mender’s Helm
Exalted
Signet of Hopeful Light

Personally, I wouldn’t go for the cloth chest. I include it because the stats are nice tough. The Spell Power/Crit arcanum is for those who are doing more LHW spamming.
Kirin Tor
Honored
Helm of the Majestic Stag (leather)
Shroud of Dedicated Research
Revered
Arcanum of Burning Mysteries
Exalted
Ghostflicker Waistband (leather)
Robes of Crackling Flame (cloth)
Pattern: Sapphire Spellthread
Design: Runed Scarlet Ruby

Again, I’d pass on the cloth sandals, but the stats are not awful. The Spell Power/mp5 arcanum is for a more traditional mostly chain heal healing role.
The Wyrmrest Accord
Revered
Arcanum of Blissful Mending
Gavel of the Brewing Storm
Exalted
Grips of Fierce Pronouncements
Sandals of Crimson Fury (cloth)

Frenzyheart Tribe
Revered
Scavenged Feathery Leggings

The Oracles
Revered
Design: Sundered Forest Emerald
Sharkjaw Cap