1st Reader, 1st critique.

Good morning, gentle readers.
I had a nice chat last night with someone I'll call S.
S, you see is someone I hold in high regard. I happen to love her like crazy and she tells me she loves me too. When we're in each other's arms I couldn't be happier. We've talked about a future together and we are optimistic it'll happen.

But S is also deeply involved with another. That "other" is World of Warcraft.

And so the things I said about WoW she took as an attack. "I don't see why you play WoW if it causes you so much pain..." she said. I told her that I honestly enjoy playing with her and that's the reason I WoW to begin with. She was nonplussed. She and I have had long conversations about the role of WoW in each other's lives. When we're away from it, things work fine. However, bring WoW into the equation and things start to get difficult. You see, gentle readers, this is where our back story begins to take on a more substantial role.
Needless to say, I'm going to have to start filling you in soon.

Here's a bit to tide you until my next post: She and I both belong to a guild.

Different guilds.

Now I've played with S's guild a couple of times. They're really nice people. The guild I'm in are nice too, but they're not on as often at night in numbers when I'm on. S's guild seems to be always on. Maybe it's just that so many people come and go that it seems she's always got her core of people she always plays with on whenever she is.

A bit of background is in order.

S started gaming with a guild when I wasn't on (being at work will do that for you) and enjoyed it so much she initially invited me. I wasn't terribly interested at the time, as I enjoyed the single-player aspect of the game (see previous post that got S so upset).

When we started, she and I picked different classes of characters to play. As things turned out, the class she picked out was extremely resilient, didn't die very often and advanced quickly.
Needless to say, the class I picked was the opposite. I was continually dying. This was an exercise in frustration. We'd be in game somewhere and I would die in the blink of an eye (to my estimation) and S couldn't understand why. I took my frustrations out on S.

This did not go well.

After much discussion, we found that she was progressing faster on her own, playing when I wasn't on. She'd still offer to play but at the time I was becoming increasingly frustrated as to how she was flying through the levels while I was plodding along.

You see, gentle readers - I really didn't have the proper grasp of the game at the time and it took a long time for me to realise that the difference in classes (and the amount of time played/experience gained by playing more AND the research S put into becoming the best in her class, getting the best equipment, finding the easiest quests with the best rewards, etc) made a lot of difference. Of course, that wasn't immediately recognizable to me at the time. But I learned much later.

So, while I was frustrated with my character, frustrated with dying so often, frustrated with S flying through the levels and becoming really powerful - we played with each other less often. S didn't enjoy playing with me and I wasn't having a good time partly because I wasn't good at it yet and partly because S didn't want to play with me anymore.

So S joined a guild. And became fast friends with everyone she played with.
Her new found friends became a reason to play more often. Initially that was a plus - She'd be on whenever I was on and I thought that was great. But we had problems and issues outside the game, in *real life*...in addition to those we'd had in game with my slow-progressing character...and those led to us being more distant in-game. Eventually she and another of her new found friends, someone I'll call FB formed their own guild and took many players from the guild they were in. All this time S and I were not getting along as well as we could have.

And then something interesting happened.