Local Warcraft Players: Part of a Unique Social Group

For someone like myself who is physically disabled it is a way to go around and do things as well as the next guy can.

Image from World of Warcraft Courtesy: techfresh.net

(SALEM, Ore.) - Like some 8 million+ folks around the planet I am involved in a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) called World of Warcraft.

It is one of many possiblre MMORPGs but it is one of the most generally popular and well known. Others include EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings, City of Heroes/Villains, etc.

People from all age groups and all walks of life play. William Shatner and Mr T recently did ads referring to their personally playing World of Warcraft. Many movie and TV stars, sports celebrities, etc play. It gives them a way of interacting with people without the whole starstruck aspect getting in the way.

Some take things too far, becoming addicted, but that is not a slam against the game... there are just addictive personality types who would become addicted to something else entirely.

I play for maybe 0-4 hours a day, 2-5 days a week. I keep it in perspective, playing once necessary real life stuff is dealt with. I play responsibly.

For someone like myself who is physically disabled it is a way to go around and do things as well as the next guy can. It is a way to meet and interact with folks from all over the globe. You never know if the person you meet in the game is the next ruler of England or your next door neighbor.

And that is where I want to go with this commentary... the neighbor aspect.

Salem, Oregon is a fairly large city of about 150,000 people, I am sure that there are many in Salem and the surrounding areas who play World of Warcraft.

I am interested in seeing how many there are and possibly getting some kind of local gathering of WoW players since I don't know about the rest of you but the costs for BlizzCon are outrageous.

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Depending on the size of the group it could be meeting at a local restaurant all the way up to maybe the convention center.

But first we need to find out who we local WoW fans are... where and what we play, etc.

I play on the Silver Hand server. It is one of the oldest servers and is a roleplaying server... a PvE (player vs environment, as opposed to PvP (player vs player)) server desiring more roleplaying. On this server I have one horde rogue level 11 and 8 Alliance characters of most classes ranging from level 13 up to level 62 currently.

So if you also play WoW and are in the local Salem area (maybe even as far as northwestern Oregon but I'm mainly looking at the concept for real locals... if not in Salem proper no more than 30 miles away for example) put in a comment stating what server(s) you play on, your characters, why you play, what you get out of it, what you put into it, etc. as well as your thoughts on possible local events for local WoW players.

This is a bit different from my normal commentaries... I am trying to get a local social group who likely does not even know they are local to interact in the real world as well as the online world.

If you have no interest in WoW or those who plsy WoW please refrain from flames in the comments as they are just counterproductive and rude. I am also not looking for flame wars between fanboys (or fangirls for that matter) of one game or another bashing other games That is not the purpose of this article and comment thread. I am asking the editors, differently from my usual, to be a bit stricter in moderation of these comments to this article in line with what I just stated as being unwelcome.

I'm hoping this works positively as I intend. Time will tell.